


Lessons in Practical Magic

by Laguera25



Category: RED (Movies), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:07:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 41,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28941936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: Being an assassin is easy, all things considered.  A little training and a decided lack of give-a-shit, and it's no challenge at all to end a life, to destroy, to sow chaos with the squeeze of a trigger.  But to nurture?  To build?  That is something else entirely, and Kirill Orlov isn't sure he's up to the task.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2





	1. The Danger of Ambition in the Middle of the Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_random_writer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_random_writer/gifts).



> I'm once again playing in the_random_writer's sandbox.

The bruises. The bruises are all he can see. It shouldn't be so, here in the dark of the basement apartment with Nera snuffling and snicking on the far edge of the bed, curled in the familiar protective lee of her brother's body. But Siberius' skin is as white as marble bathed in moonlight, and Kirill's eyes can see the absence of that flawless whiteness as easily as he'd once tracked his quarry through the scope of his rifle. They're unnatural blots against insulted flesh, dark and irregular, nightshade blooming in the Siberian snow. So many of them, as though each of the holes he'd punched in the basement walls had echoed themselves in his lover's flesh in retribution.

He traces the ugly map of them. The wide, livid line across his throat just below the Adam's apple, left there, no doubt, but a restraining arm that gave not a damn for the life that struggled in its grip. The dark blossom on his jaw, complete with the unfurling petals of knuckles. The spreading stain on his sternum, black and fathomless as the waters of the tundra. A welter of bruises that pepper his ribs like grapeshot, and God, how they must throb even though Siberius hasn't made a peep. He's tempted to probe for fractures, for further proof of a barbarity no one in the good old U.S. of A will ever admit, lest it tarnish its image of itself as the sainted city upon a hill that the rest of the world envies for its rectitude, but Siberius is sleeping deeply, and he's loath to wake him with an injudicious prod of his finger and recall him to the land of his torments, and so he suppresses the impulse and finishes his quiet inventory of Uncle Sam's sins.

A pair of bruises on his kidneys. Ligature marks at wrists and ankles. Straps, if he had to guess, though of leather or Kevlar he cannot tell. The bastards beat his ass with fists and feet and whatever suited their fancy in the face of his resistance, and then they strapped him down--as tightly as they could by the depth of the bruises and the puffiness of his skin at his wrists and ankles are any indication. And then...

And then they pumped him full of fuck knows what and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It's the American goddamn way, much as they might protest their innocence and righteousness with stirring speeches and somber ceremonies to commemorate their sacred heroes and all the times they saved an insufficiently-grateful world. 

The thought makes his head throb as though the fracture in his skull has opened anew, and he wills the tension from his neck and shoulders and breathes through the pain, rides it like the crest of a wave until it ebbs and recedes. These are not the first bruises Siberius' flesh has ever known; a Necromonger lord and first commander has but one purpose, and battle leaves no one unscathed, no matter how skilled. Hell, he's left bruises of his own, the shadows of his thumbs on the spars of his hips and the imprint of his lips and teeth on throat and clavicle and the sweet, secret spot just below his fourth rib that makes him buck and whine and writhe so prettily for him.

 _But it is not violence that moves you to put them there,_ Grandmother Orlova murmurs sagely from the high court of her rocking chair, and shakes her head. _No._ The thick, knotted wool of her shawl whispers and sighs with the motion of her rounded shoulders, and she picks at the fabric of her skirt and smooths away a tat of errant fabric. _Mmm. No. If it were, then these marks would be nothing to you, only more proof of his ferocity, his strong, Russian soul that gives him the strength to endure anything, to bleed and break and keep walking all the same._

_It is love that moves you to press these reminders of yourself into his unguarded flesh, love and the hope of a sweeter life than the one pressed upon you by a father you had never chosen and the hard indifference of circumstance, that cruel teacher who does not care for the fragile dreams of her pupils and opens her hands to give them only what she carries. The shadow of your fingers and the memory of your mouth are the stamps of a sacred compact meant to bind you to him until God himself parts you with a sweep of His hand. It is the most sacred oath that you have ever made, though none but you have heard it, and to see it profaned by marks such as these makes your blood run hot and pure with the need for vengeance. And why not? Vengeance you understand. Vengeance is easy. And when it is delivered well, it is an ecstasy to make the devil blush._

_And you are a devil still, aren't you,_ moy mal'chik? She clucks and shakes her head, and her rosary beads rattle in her creased palm like shards of bone gone dark with age. _For all that his unswerving devotion has softened your edges and blunted your serrated, poisonous tongue, you are still a child of rage, your bones gone to pith inside skin that remembers and begrudges every scar and your teeth too long and too sharp inside a mouth sour with the memory of old blood, not all of it your own. It is still second nature to kill rather than save, to break rather than mend, to curse rather than bless. For such things you were made by men who saw you, not as a child of God, born of a mother who paid for you in blood and agony and the wages of Eve's sin, but as a child of the void, chaos to be tamed for their own ends. Damnation was all you had known since the light of your small, lonely world had been spirited away in the back of a lumbering station wagon that belched oily, blue smoke from its tailpipe, and you trusted its cold inhumanity far more than you trusted the love of an old woman too ravaged by time and sorrow to protect you from the wolves that waited, lean and hungry and so terribly patient, outside your door._

_So much better to become one of them than to be devoured by them._

_You are grateful for your life with Viko and his orderly, American white-picket fence existence with Michelle and his children, but it is muted and blunted and grey at the edges, an endless sameness of going to the job he got for you in his brotherly mercy and concern and sitting in a cubicle that reminds you of the kill room that haunts your dreams, if perhaps a little cleaner in the pathological, paranoid way of Americans, who cower at every germ and then wonder why their children are always sickly and allergic to the very air they breathe. You stare at the screen and compile your bloodless statistics and file your reports and tell yourself that it is enough, more than you deserve, if you were to tell the truth, and you do not miss the weight of a sniper rifle in its case as you thread your way through the back streets, filled with anonymous purpose, a good soldier for Mother Russia. You don't miss the throb of a Prague nightclub and the invitations of beautiful, young women drawn to your money and your high cheekbones and the hard glint of danger in the eyes you inherited from your mother. You don't miss Russia or the frigid beauty of her winters, when the air is so cold that it skims over your tongue like a blade if you are stupid enough to let your mouth hang open. You don't miss knowing who you were._

_It is a secret you can tell no one, Kiryusha--not God, not William, not even yourself when you stare into the mirror late at night with the fire of vodka still on your breath--but hunting down William's captors and drenching the dirty concrete and damp earth with their blood and brains was a resurrection, a first breath after being buried alive. Your every sense was brilliantly clear, and the gun in your hand was as glorious as the ripe, willing flesh of a woman. To run through the narrow corridors in search of your prey was to fly, and their wheezing, shrill breaths and pounding footsteps as they fled the inevitable was the heavenliest of music. And every shot you put into their spines or the backs of their heads as they whined and scrabbled for a freedom they would never see was another breath of life into your body._

_They deserved to die,_ he counters remorselessly. _They took William from me, and from his family._ He thinks of William as they had found him that sweltering morning in that squalid shithole of a cell. Thin and filthy and nearly blind from malnutrition and lack of light, with matted hair and ragged clothes that hung on his gaunt frame and scarred nailbeds black with dirt. Blood and shit on the floor and the reek of stale piss hanging in the air in a smothering pall that had made his eyes water.

 _Who's there?_ William' voice, thin and querulous, and yes, afraid as he'd squirmed on the floor and squinted at the silver glint of Siberius' armor as he'd stepped over the brains of the last guard and stopped in front of the cell, halberd in hand.

Crawling with lice and weak as a child as he willed his mind to make sense of the sudden noise and the shadowy figure who loomed suddenly in front of his cell. How strange it must've been for Viko, then, to look up and see a face that was so like his and yet not quite right. He'd never considered it before, focused as he'd been on pulling his brother from that killing snare, but now he wonders if Viko had thought he was hallucinating, that his mind had buckled beneath the strain of torture, starvation, and isolation, and never mind all the tried-and-true techniques of his instructors in the Corps and in the sterile, excruciatingly-sane classrooms at Quantico, where even the most lunatic real-world simulations could be terminated with the flip of a switch. How else to explain his little brother's appearance before his cell in armor forged by a sci-fi nerd with secret ren faire yearnings? Hadn't he thought much the same when he'd seen Viko's face gazing dispassionately up at him from beneath the electrified netting? Hadn't he wondered just when he had, quietly and without his notice, slipped into insanity?

 _Who're you?_ That querulous, rasping croak again, so unlike William's confident ooh-rah bark, and feet caked in grime and stippled with weeping sores that had once been needle punctures slapped and scuffled erratically on the concrete as his addled mind told him to retreat from the likely threat.

But there was no threat in Siberius. His rage, cold and beautiful and sleek as the arctic wolf, had been spent on the men whose blood and brains clung to the blade of his halberd in gelid, clotting smears and spattered his breastplate, rubies strewn from the approving hand of Tsiphone. _It is all right,_ he said, his voice so deep that it had raised gooseflesh on his arms. It was the voice of wrath, cold and pitiless, and of judgment without mercy. The voice of sex in a pitch-black room that smelled of incense and blood and remorseless need. _I come with your kin, the blood of your blood._

William had been too weak and exhausted to understand, his mental processes slowed to a crawl by his body's desperate bid for survival, but the cowering animal that cringes and curls up inside every man had understood the motion of Siberius' arms as he'd lowered the halberd from his shoulder and tightened his hands around the haft. There should've been too little light in that fetid little hole for his blade to gleam, especially caked as it was with blood and atonement, and yet it had shone with a malevolent glow as he'd swung at the corroded metal bars worn smooth in places by the press of William's sweat-slick palms. His fearless brother had curled in on himself, knees drawn to his shrunken belly and arms wrapped around his head as though to stave off the executioner's justice, and his stomach had slalomed and hollowed at the sight of his unthinking terror. It was a measure of how far they had abased him, how close they had come to breaking he who was unbreakable, and he'd ached with the urge to raise the dead just so he could send them to hell again.

_Your love for Siberius was a fierce, white flame then, hot as the sparks that flew from his halberd, so total that reason fled and you forgot even Viko, who until then had been, not just the center of your world, but the reason for it. It was baptism, and as it washed over you, you were sure it would consume you and reduce you to a fine ash that would settle over this cursed ground in a purifying dust._

_The first brilliant flash of it was pushed aside all too soon by your worry for William, lying on the floor of his conquered cell, limbs twitching and eyes blinking against the flakes of iron rust that drifted to the floor, but it lingered behind your eyes like the afterimage left by those old, boxy cameras the KGB used to take your picture before they beat you to death and left you to die in the dark in a pile of shit and your own shattered teeth. You caught glimpses of it in the hours and days after, when Siberius disappeared into the shadows of your reunion, all but ignored as you spent every moment trying to put William together again as he had done for you not so long ago. But he had done so with his house and his wife's money and the full weight and might of the U.S. government behind him. You had only a shuttle, a few crates of MREs and canned soup, a silent child who watched everything with dark, curious eyes and squatted in corners with her teddy bear dangling by one arm from a skinny, white hand._

_And Siberius. Always Siberius. He moved within the shadows to which you had so thoughtlessly banished him and became a shadow himself, unseen and unheard and too often unacknowledged while you hovered over your reflection made flesh and worried and obsessed over things you could not change and sniped to pass along the pain and guilt you could not escape. He piloted the shuttle to the cabin that would become William's sanctuary while he was too weak to do anything but eat and sleep and shuffle unsteadily to the toilet on feet that left flecks of dried, scabbing skin in his wake. He hauled the water with which you would wash him from the river and boiled it on the ancient stove and treated it with purification tablets to ward off a sickness William could never have withstood, weak as he was, helpless as a kitten as he mumbled and snored in the bed. He chopped the wood for the fires that would keep you warm and burned the clothes no soap could clean. He squatted by the river and scrubbed clothes that reeked of piss and shit and fever sweat, and when he was finished, he spread them on logs to dry and went inside to work miracles with the freeze-dried swill and tinned soup you'd packed into the shuttle before you set out on your rescue mission. He hunted and fished and clubbed rabbits to give you food that would actually do you some good, and all of this he did without a murmur of complaint, no matter the words you spoke when you had thought him insufficiently dvoted to your cause._

_Nor did he complain when you used him. And you_ did _use him,_ moe mal'chik. _And seldom kindly. You came to him in the night while William slept his fitful sleep and offered him only your need and the roughness of your hands. No tenderness now, no endearments. Those were for William, to convince him to stay when it would be so much easier to slip into the blessed nothingness. Just ragged breath and orders to take away your anguish for a time with the work of his hands and mouth and the yielding heat of his body._

_This you did not mean. You have given yourself to the devil, demon boy, but never to devils such as that. For you, it was always business, a means to the money that paid for your vodka and your whores. You took no pleasure in the infliction of pain. You did not understand what you had done until Siberius, seemingly impervious to pain as he walked through your enemies like the remorseless advance of the sea, flinched from your hand. Time stopped, and you stared at him in confusion, and then you saw him--really saw him--for the first time since the sight of William shivering on that cell floor had made you blind to everything else._

Oh, my God, _you thought as you looked into his eyes and saw, not the joyful spark you had come to expect, but resignation and sorrow and a watchful wariness that you had seen too often in your own eyes as you crept around that claustrophobic flat in St. Petersburg and prayed that my fool of a son would not find fault with the son he had chosen today._ Oh, my love, what have I done? I have become my father.

_You were not even sure he was your love anymore as you took in his hollow cheeks and the fatigue smudged beneath his eyes and the high, cautious set of his shoulders. Perhaps you had driven that from him with your harsh words and demanding hands, driven it from him with the brutal snap of your hips as you drove yourself into his body and gave him nothing in return but another list of chores to be done at once._

I'm sorry, _you wanted to say, but the words were unwieldy and foreign on your tongue, and anyway, they had always been so empty and useless on the rare occasion they had been offered to you. Had there ever been a word your father could say that would belie the disappointment in his glassy eyes whenever he looked at you, any words that would've made you stop wondering if he were looking at you and wishing he'd taken William instead? William, the one who had been strong enough to come twelve minutes earlier, and who had never wanted to paint the colors of the sunset at his mother's feet? No. And so you said no words to Siberius, no idiot, useless words that would do nothing to erase the wariness in his eyes. Instead, you pulled him close and crooned nonsense syllables into his ear until the tension bled from his body and his breathing deepened._

Never. Never, _you wanted to tell him. Never need he fear your violence, your contempt. He was as sacred to you as the Russian soil you so often wished to feel, beneath your feet, but you were not sure then that you could keep such a promise. You had broken so many others. To naive girls who had spent the night in your bed, never knowing that they would be discarded after the deed was done and forgotten by dawn, their name scarcely known and washed from your lips with the first sip of coffee. To sobbing women cowering in showers and in the backs of closets or huddled behind beds with dead phones clutched in their trembling hands like talismans to ward off the darkness that stalked them, begging for mercy with snot on their faces. To pasty, pot-bellied rich men with soft hands who have outlived their usefulness to the men who made them rich, men who offered you money to spare their lives, offered their nubile young daughters in exchange for another day, another year. To children who saw you taking their parents on a ride from which they would never return and which would throw their small lives into a rootless chaos you understood too well._

_You were a liar, and you could not be sure that love could purge you of such a sin._

It's all right, my love, _you crooned in Russian, the language he found so exotic and beautiful when you moved against him beneath the sheets._

He flushes at the idea of his pious grandmother having any knowledge of what he gets up to beneath the sheets, but the doughty old woman is unfazed by his spasm of propriety and continues without a stutter.

It's all right, _you assured him._ You are so tired. You sleep now. I will look after things for a while. Even I can't fuck up an MRE and some canned soup, and there's canned tuna for the imp. 

_His brow furrowed._ Then I have not displeased you? You have been so unhappy with me...

 _You shook your head._ No. _Emphatic. Perhaps too emphatic, because he tensed again, and you traced the seam of an old scar on his back to soothe him._ No. Never with you, my love, never with you. _You fumbled for words that would explain without exposing your fear, your terror of not being able to save William as he had saved you._ It's just... Viko. _As though that one word explained everything._

 _And maybe it did, because Siberius, too, was a brother. He, too, lived with his heart wandering about outside his chest. There was no anger in him when he spoke._ He will be fine. He is strong, like you, _he said._ And the little bird is very good at raising the alarm. We will not let him slip away, I give you my word.

_It would have meant nothing coming from the lips of most men, but it came from Siberius, who held his honor as sacred, and who had proved his loyalty with blood and sacrifice when he could have run and left you to grope blindly in the vast darkness of a thousand worlds, and who had risked the heart of his world to help you find yours._

There is some broth in the shuttle refrigeration unit, _he went on, the words heavy and crumbling in his mouth._ It's full of nutrients. All you have to do is heat it on the hotplate. If he doesn't like that, there's the porridge Nera likes. Just remember to add butter and brown sugar at the end and stir, else it will clump and taste like parchment.

Stop talking, _you ordered._ I am a stupid man, but not so stupid that I cannot make porridge.

You sure about that? _William muttered inside your head, and smirked at you from behind the rim of that ugly Agency mug he favored._

Shut up, Viko, _you grumbled as you eased Siberius beneath the covers and drew your fingertips over the pale, delicate skin above his ear._ Keep giving me shit, and I'll make _you_ shit until it hurts.

_You did no such thing. William was too weak for such childish acts of vengeance for imaginary crimes. You heated the broth and made the porridge according to Siberius' instructions, and while they warmed and bubbled and filled the shuttle with the promise of sustenance and the comforting smell of a home you tried not to remember, you wondered how Siberius could still love you when you had ignored all that he had done while you lost yourself in William. While you had snapped and snarled and demanded too much and made of yourself the tyrant that he had fled, so that even sunny Nera began to retreat from you like a songbird seeking the sanctuary of the nest, he had been here, making broth and replenishing stores and keeping an ear cocked for your next imperious summons._

_It made you sick with shame, and your head and belly throbbed with it as you spooned the work of his hands into William's wobbling, eager mouth and checked the wounds on his feet. You fed the fire with wood Siberius had chopped and covered William with blankets that he kept clean and kept your watch on a sofa from which he had beaten the dust, and when Nera crept from her corner in search of a bowl for her own empty belly, it was in the company of a teddy bear patched and mended by his patient hands._

_It humbled you, and when you went to his bed that night, it was not as a lord demanding his right but as a penitent with your heart in your hands. You came not to be worshipped, but to worship, and how surprised he was when you made an offering of yourself. You still treasure how he gasped and trembled and writhed beneath the fumbling work of your hands and mouth. Desire still burned, still filled you with the hunger only men know, but there was tenderness, too, and the words_ I love you _were sweet and fragile as candyglass on your tongue._

 _Babushka, please,_ he pleads. He has no desire to stand so naked before an old woman who had seen him in diapers. Besides, the memory her words inspire are causing an embarrassing twinge of nostalgic arousal that he cannot satisfy with Siberius a boneless lump beneath the covers and Nera a slack sprawl at the opposite edge of the bed, Sibearius the bear lying on her chest like a shipwrecked sailor riding the swell of her rising and falling chest. Nera is deaf, and discreet, to boot, but even she wouldn't be able to ignore a desperate fuck six inches to her left.

The old woman shakes her head and sighs as though he's being unreasonably squeamish in his reticence to bare the secrets of his bedroom to her thin-lipped scrutiny, and her rosary beads _clack clack clack_ in the soft, plump creases of her palm. _You act as if I've never seen one before,_ she tuts. _I've seen my share, boy. I wasn't always so old._ She snorts and sighs and pumps her swollen feet against the floor, an aging Godiva spurring her fleshless steed.

 _The point,_ she sniffs as the runners creak and groan against the floor, _is that you undid the damage you had so stupidly done in your fear and blind, flailing anger. Siberius felt the words you were not yet man enough to say, accepted the apology and invitation in your touch, and when you fell asleep entangled in each other's arms, you slept the sleep of the cleansed. Your heart was light as the summer wind when you woke in the morning with Siberius' hair tickling your nose, and the knowledge that this was love gave you the courage to admit that you and he_ had a thing _when William asked about it a few days later over his morning coffee._

_Not such an admission it would seem. Many men before you have loved, and many more honorably and more easily, but you never intended it to be love. It was meant to be a diversion, a pleasant passing of the nights until you could collect your bounty and find your brother, a cure for the boredom of hunkering down in a villa far removed from the pulsating nightlife of the city and the skilled caress of a woman whose desire was as good as the money you gave her. It was a game the first time you kissed him, drifting toward him with the languid grace of a strand of kelp bobbing on the tide, but you did not understand the game you played, nor were you prepared for the fire that simple kiss ignited, or for the intensity of the pleasure when he called your bluff and pressed you against the shore of the lagoon, his mouth tasting of sunlight and sea salt and his hand slithering between your legs to grip you. It was the beginning of your fall, and its end was written in the hesitant caress of his tongue as it slipped into your mouth._

_But you are a stubborn boy, and you have never made things easy for yourself, and so you resisted. You took the pleasure he offered so freely and happily and gave it in turn only because you did not want it to be said that you could not satisfy. You refused to lie with him after, but banished him to his own bed as soon as the deed was done and you had returned to your senses. You never curled around him to whisper sweet nothings and sleepy reassurances in his ear, but turned your back to him and waited for him to slink from you in confusion and shame and yes, hurt. His hurt and shame shamed you in turn, but you told yourself that it was better this way, that if he was so stupid as to offer hiss tenderness and his body when you treated him as a convenience to be used and set aside, then he deserved what came to him. Love was for the ignorant and the stupid, and you were neither._

_So you told yourself so confidently as you sat on the balcony of the villa beneath the stars and drank vodka from the bottle while a cigarette spent itself between your fingertips, and yet you could not help but seek it with a child's desperation. You told yourself you did not need him, did not want him, and yet, more nights than not, you sought him out, called him into your bed and sank into the warmth of his body with a soft, ragged cry it would have embarrassed you for anyone to hear because such was the cry of yearning lovers, not a man simply passing the time until he could return to the safety and the empty pleasure of his whores. You used him and you banished him, and then you lay in the dark with his sweat on your body and his seed on your belly and longed for his touch because you were too proud and too stupid to admit it was more than a game._

_You told yourself these lies even as you ate his food and played with his trusting little sister who adored you and listened to his stories of a life before the Necromongers had destroyed his homeworld and placed him in their thrall. You told them even as his fingers carded through your hair while you shivered and sweated and gritted your teeth against the agony in your head._

It is all right, _ma atet nin._ You are with us, and nothing will hurt you here. It is all right, and you are safe. _Soft and sure and more than you and your selfish cruelty deserved, and you wanted to cry for the shame of it, but your masters had beaten tears out of you along with your hope for a normal life and a better end than facedown in a ditch with a length of piano wire embedded in the swollen, purple flesh of your neck._

_You persisted in these lies until you almost lost him to the Lord Marshall's blade. It was luck as much as skill that he survived, a chance brush of a drugged child's fingers across the toe of the Marshall's boot that allowed Siberius to strike the killing blow. He stood triumphant, the blood of his former master pooling at his feet and reaching for Nera's twiggy knees with mesmerizing implacability, but there was no exultation in your heart because you saw the blood on his teeth as he spoke, dark as plum wine._

_His voice betrayed nothing when he spoke, deep and resonant as it washed over the bowed heads of his new subjects; to show weakness was to invite treachery and death, but his tread was slow and careful as he descended the stairs to inspect the spoils that were his by right as the new Lord Marshall, and he was so very careful not to let Nera jostle him as he took her by the hand and led her away from curious, unkind scrutiny._

_It wasn't until you were in the privacy of his new quarters that you saw the extent of the damage, so masterfully hidden by his gait and his bearing and his armor. The Marshall's blade had struck home beneath his floating rib and sunk deep, and his tunic was soaked with blood. Far too much blood for a normal man to survive without, but this was Siberius, and he stood swaying before you, his eyes bright with pain and the losing fight against delirium._

Don't let Nera see, _he managed, and blood bubbled between teeth that had nipped your earlobe and skimmed over your chest and belly as they sought out sweeter, more sensitive ground._

I'm going to lose him, _you thought dully, and the hole in the pit of your belly that had begun to close since you and your beloved William were reunited yawned wide, a hot stab of sympathetic agony that made the breath stutter in your throat._ I could do triage if I had the tools, but this might as well be fucking Kazakhstan for all I know where to find a needle or some gauze. He's going to die on this rock he fled, and it's my fault. I brought them here. He's bleeding to death because of me, and I can't stop it.

_All you could do was blink at him and swallow around a hot lump of shame and guilt. You could not, could not lose him after you had lost so much else and regained but so little of it by clawing it back from a indifferent, gluttonous world that took for the spiteful, gloating joy of it. He had made you feel, much as you had so stubbornly resisted it, and you had begun to dream dreams you dared not name. You could not let him slip away, could not go back to sleeping alone in a bed that smelled of an anonymous woman long gone and your own sweat and drinking the emptiness away. Yet neither could you move. You could only blink like an ox before the slaughterman and watch pale Siberius grow paler with every breath._

_You might've stood there like a fool and watched the best thing in your life bleed to death if you hadn't been interrupted by the arrival of a slight, fey man with grey eyes and thin lips and a permanent curl to his upper lip. His cool gaze assessed the situation in a brisk sweep, and then he stepped around you and strode toward the rear of the room._

Bring him. _Crisp as the clack of his boots on the stone floor, and you were tempted to slap the impertinence from him even as your limbs, unburdened by the ridiculous ego of men, moved to obey. Siberius put up no resistance as you guided him in your mysterious benefactor's wake, and the ease with which you led him made your stomach drop and sour. He was ordinarily solid as the earth over which he strode so confidently, moved only by his own will, but now he staggered and lolled like a drunk wobbling out of a Moscow bar. Even his breathing had lost its slow, implacable rhythm and left him in erratic, rattling gasps and queer pants, a dog throttling at the end of a strangling chain._

Pick up your feet, _you snapped, because it was easier than the plea that hammered against your ribcage in a frantic tattoo, the raw, scabbed fists of a prisoner with the smell of approaching death in his nostrils._ I love you. Don't go. Not like this. Not because of me. _And in a helpless spasm of selfishness for which you will ever hate yourself,_ If you go, I will never find William.

_Siberius, ever the soldier even in his unhurried dying, did his best to obey the command, and his blood seeped from beneath his breastplate and dripped onto the floor in a thick patter that made your heart flutter in your throat, a lump of borscht that you could not force down your protesting gullet._

_Your escort yanked back a heavy brocade curtain to reveal what you thought was a plastic coffin._

He's not dead yet. Not yet, _you wanted to snap, a lion defending his dying mate, but the pragmatist in you knew that his feet were well upon the path, and that if you stopped to argue the point, he would slip from your grasp and wilt to the floor like a stalk of threshed wheat. You tightened your grip on him and hissed at him to stand the fuck up, dammit._

_And even then, so close to the darkness that so few can resist, he heard you and willed his failing body to comply._

Get him undressed and into the tank, _the man ordered with a flick of his hand._

If I take off his armor, he'll die before I can get him in, _you countered, and oh, how your love was fading. His head drooped on the stem of his neck like a dying lily, and each breath was a shallow effort._

 _Cold grey eyes gazed back at you. The man shrugged._ If you don't get it off and him into that tank in the next ninety seconds, he's dead all the same. _Indifferent as the stone beneath his booted feet, but his eyes were sharp inside his bloodless face._

You want him to live, _you realized._ Fuck knows why, but you want him alive. Help me, _you spat as you shifted Siberius' growing weight into your arms and against your chest._

_Siberius, his awareness of the world fading with every breath, thought you were talking to him, and he floundered feebly in your grasp, fingers clawing weakly at your arms in a bid to straighten himself._

Ssssh, not you, _you crooned into his ear, and wished for the time to soothe him with a kiss or a caress._

I should be more careful, _you thought as you shrugged out of his grip and tugged at his armor,_ should show you the tenderness you show me when the accident in Berlin reaches from its shallow grave and sinks its filthy claws into the divot in my head, makes me shiver and writhe and swallow against the sour burn of vodka on its unscheduled return trip from my stomach. Makes me want to scream and beg for my mother and press into the fading memory of her hand. _But there was no time. There was only the trickle of blood that became a freshet with every layer and the sticky, sucking scrape of torn skin and fractured bone as you yanked his breastplate over his head with the mindless ferocity of a conqueror claiming his prize. He cried out at that, a howl clamped behind tightly-pressed lips, but consolation was a waste of time he did not have, and so you indulged in the deafness that came so naturally to his beloved little bird and tore his tunic from his body with a savage wrench of your hands, cruel in your desperation._

Stand the fuck up! _you hissed as he sagged against you, but he was too weak to attempt obedience by then, and your heart thudded a painful, strangling dirge in your throat._

Don't you fucking dare, you worthless cocksucker, _you snarled as you manhandled him into your arms and ignored the throbbing twinge from your unprepared back._ You don't have the fucking right to die on me now. You will keep breathing, or I will kill you. _The rattle of your own breath as you staggered beneath his weight and the dull clunk of his booted heels against the side of the coffin as you hefted him onto the side._

Time grows short, sir, _your unhelpful companion noted, as though the time was running out on a game of drunken charades in the unit mess. He hadn't lifted a finger to help you, and if your hands hadn't been so full of a dying Siberius, you would've taken a cold, perverse delight in slowly ripping his balls off and cramming them into his infuriating mouth._

_You nearly fractured your swooning beloved's skull by tipping him haphazardly into the box._

Probably just a box to catch the blood and leave less of a mess for this fussy prick to mop up, _you thought as you wrenched off his boots and peeled off his socks to reveal alabaster feet that had gone the dismaying fishbelly white of bodies pulled from the river after the spring thaw. They dropped into the depths of the tub with the uncompromising thud of a dressed kill, and his heels carried the bruises for days after._

Only just, _your unsettling assistant murmured, and bloodless lips curled into a mirthless smile. You wanted to break him, to make him taste his own blood upon his teeth, but he was the only one who knew how to operate the tank that was Siberius' only hope, and so he survived unscathed to tap a keypad with supple fingers._

_The tank filled with a glottal rush of what you thought to be water, but that soon thickened into the consistency of gelatin and oozed into his wound in a greedy, unhurried seep that made your flesh crawl. Not a peep from Siberius. He lay as a man already dead, his eyes glassy and terribly blank, and you thought of your father lying on that cold morgue slab in Moscow, his eyes sunken and bruised inside their sockets and his head curiously flat against the chilled steel._

Sibrochka is not my father, _you told yourself with the panicky stubbornness of a child who sees the shadow of the wolf outside his door, lean and ravenous and eager to snatch the last of his security._ Sibrochka is too strong to die. He can't. He won't. _Your jaw ached._

And now I leave you, _your companion announced._ You need only ring the silver bell on that table if you require service. _He gestured to a long-handled silver bell with the nonchalant elegance of a servant accustomed to the superior knowledge of those he served._

Wait. What am I supposed to do with him? _You meant it to be commanding, but it was the plaintive cry of a child beyond his depth._

 _The man raised his eyebrow._ Do? _he echoed blandly, and clasped his hands in front of him._

With the machine. With him.

The machine will do its work in its own time. Do not touch it. As for the Lord Commander, what becomes of him now is the will of the Underverse. But if it comforts you, I suppose you could pray.

_And with that and a deferential inclination of his head, he left you to the shadows of those unfamiliar rooms, silent as the morgue in which you saw what remained of your father after the Lord had exacted His vengeance for his sins. Nera flitted uneasily in the darkened corners, a flash of shift and alabaster feet, and you felt her gaze upon you._

Going to have to break you of that habit, little kitten, _you thought dully as you watched the outline of her sidle to and fro._ So many monsters there are in the dark, and they can see.

_But you had greater concerns just then, like quieting her cries when she emerged from her hiding place to see her brother suspended so nakedly between life and death and finding food for her empty belly once you had convinced her that her brother was still alive and mending in that vat of goo. How oddly your new manservant looked at her when he swept into the room with trays of fruit and cheese and peeled prawns. As though she were a failed creation that had escaped oblivion and defied the will of gods older than our own._

You should have a care with her, _he said as he set the trays on the table._

And you should go fuck yourself, _you wanted to snarl, but you only gave a brusque nod and made a mental note to find a blade to slip between his ribs at the earliest opportunity._

_There was nothing for it but to wait, and so you did, hour after hour. You had no appetite for anything but the comforting burn of vodka, which this alien world could not supply, but Nera ate from force of habit, the memory of starvation still too fresh to afford the luxury of mooning, chewing and swallowing with joyless, mechanical stolidity, her gaze drifting between your face and her brother in that vat of goo. With neither vodka or the pleasure of a meal to occupy and distract you, you could only pace the room and settle for a few restless moments in this chair or that, a grackle that could find no comfortable roost, before rising to shuffle to the tank and the table and the chair nearest both._

_For all the sneering about weakness and deficiency, the child who neither heard nor spoke had the lion's share of the brains between you because when she was finished with her supper, she politely stacked her plates and set about making a nest of blankets on the floor beside the tank in which her brother stewed like a cabbage. You tried to stop her, huffed and gesticulated and jabbed a commanding finger at the bed dressed in silver silk, but she was neither intimidated nor impressed by your broken edicts drawn by idiot fingers, and she simply spared you a pitying look and carried on with her task._

What does it matter? _you thought sullenly as she trundled past you with a bundle of blankets in her arms._ If she wants to go back to sleeping on the floor, let her. _As if you could stop her. You'd never had the heart to raise a hand to her, and you had even less then, when her brother hung between this world and the next, his life and your best chance of finding Viko depending on the mysterious glop in which he floated and his will to survive. So you told yourself you would allow it, and that this left the bed for you._

 _But the bed was too big, and the silk was clammy against your skin, as though the goo had escaped the tank and crept across the floor to claim another prize. You squirmed and thrashed and muttered to yourself beneath the sheets, but you could not sleep for eyeing the tank, ears straining for any change in its sound or for stealthy footfalls beyond the door, assassins come to finish off their wounded new Lord. And in the end you bowed to the inevitable and joined Nera on the floor with your own pile of blankets. She was lost in dreams and did not say_ I told you so, _but you thought it for her as you settled in behind her with your face to the door and the blade that had brought down the Lord Marshall beneath your pillow, still black and ripe with blood._

_There were no assassins, just the manservant on his morning rounds, come with a tray of strong tea and bowls of porridge thick enough to coat your ribs. He set it down with the muted clatter of silver cutlery and bowed at the waist._

I trust this is to your liking. Did you sleep well? _Perfectly proper, and yet your fingers curled and itched with the urge to plunge a knife into the side of his neck or collapse his throat with a sudden strike._

My sleep is not your concern, _you answered, ever gracious._

As you say, _came the unruffled reply, and he brushed his fingers together and turned his attention to the tank._ And how is our new Lord Marshall today? _Insinuating as alpine woodsmoke drifting through the pines, and in your mind's eye, you saw a snake slithering through a chink in a wooden cabin, head upraised and tongue flicking the frigid air._

Don't you fucking touch him, _you wanted to shout, but he was the only one who understood the machine that had no equal on God's earth, and so you held your tongue and followed him as he glided to the tank and peered inside._

Ah, yes, _he murmured, and you thought of the snake again, sleek and dark as the shadows through which it moved with such surety._ Yes, I believe this will do. As though he were assessing a shank of mutton for the spit. He clucked and spun on his heel and hurried to the keypad, where his fingers skittered over the keys.

The tank drained with a sudden, throaty rush, and Siberius settled to its bottom with a muted thump, slick with goo, a child born into the world without a mother's cradling warmth.

What are you doing? _you demanded, and crowded the side of the tank._

Do you think that you can recall the suspension fluid if you just bluster enough? _the manservant asked drily, and only the fear of knocking the tank from its stand kept you from launching yourself at him._

The nanotechs have done all they can. He's lost a great deal of blood, and there may be damage beyond even their reach. Now it is in the hands of the Underverse.

The Underverse? 

_The manservant raised a thin eyebrow at your blankness._ Has our Lord not explained the Necromonger way? I must confess surprise. He was one of our most ardent believers, and an exalted favorite of He Who Has Transcended. He aspired to become a Holy Half-dead, or so rumor has it.

He has spoken of it. I just haven't paid much attention, _you muttered. You did not add the thought that followed._ I was too busy putting his mouth to other uses.

You will come to the faith soon enough, I have no doubt. Though perhaps his devotion to the faith was not as great as we supposed. _His gaze drifted to Nera, who had risen from her nest and fallen upon the breakfast you had so foolishly neglected with the fervor of a starving wolf pup, and his lips twitched at some private amusement he did not share._

His faith is none of your concern. All that should concern you now is bringing fresh towels and some sheets warmer than this bullshit silk.

As you wish, _came the unruffled reply, and you resolved to gut him the moment Siberius was strong enough to flee._

_Siberius was limp and lolling and leaden as a dead infant when you lifted him from the tank, and so very cold that you winced and instinctively tucked him closer. This was perverse; this was not Sibrochka. Your Siberius was vital and warm and strong as the young gods of the olden days, when Baba Yaga was not a witch but a queen of the forest, and he curled around you in the night to offer you his warmth and soothe the burning throb in your mended skull and the dull, cold agony of your surgically-repaired leg. That he should be reduced to this was an abomination._

_That it was because of you was a crushing stone upon your heart._

You must wake, Sibrochka, _you murmured as you carried him to the bed and suspension fluid dripped from the ends of his fingers and toes like afterbirth._ I cannot do this alone. I will never find Viko, _you thought as you settled him on the silk sheets._ I will never be able to love Nera as you do.

_But his spirit still slumbered, and he did not wake, not then, and not when the steward returned with a stack of towels and thick, wool linens. Not when you slammed the door in the steward's face and engaged every lock, and not when you scrubbed at him with wads of rough cotton and tossed them aside when they were too befouled to be of further use. You scrubbed and swore and goaded, your fear and impotent rage turned to bile and venom, and still he slept and slept, as deaf to your curses and orders as his sister, who watched in silence, eating her porridge in dreamy bites._

_So long he slept, and he was so very cold despite the blankets you mounded over him and the tight, dogged curl of Nera by his side. He was no warmer when you crawled in beside him and pressed your lips to ear to whisper pleas and imprecations and carded your fingers through hair in dire need of an oiling. Death, you were sure, had come for him and was only biding its time, savoring your anguish like a sweetmeat._

_And so when he opened his eyes late in the endless evening that ruled Helion Prime and uttered a dry, croaking chuckle, you were so surprised that what should have been a prayer of thanksgiving was instead an insult, and your hands were everywhere--his face, his chest, tearing at the blankets to examine his wound._

Nera? _he rasped, and scrabbled feebly at the mattress in an effort to sit up._

Is gobbling my stew, _you snapped, and shoved him back against the pillows._ Lie down, asshole. I'm fine, too, by the way.

 _The faintest of smiles._ So it would seem.

There is nothing funny about this, _you spat. Now that death's gaze had turned from him, your terror had curdled into a helpless anger. You peered at his wound, which was now little more than a thin, white seam between his ribs, and dwarfed by the ragged knot of scar tissue left by another opponent long ago._

 _His hand reached for your shoulder._ Should I not be glad to be alive? _he asked mildly, and the dry amusement in it was sand against your wounded heart._

 _You shook him off._ You could have died. _You rose from the edge of the bed and retreated to the foot, where you crossed your arms and glowered at him._

Yes, _he answered mildly,_ that is the risk of a duel to the death. It is the Necromonger way. You keep what you kill.

To be a reckless fool? You could have lost everything.

And you could have lost your chance to find your brother. _Cool now, and the wicked gleam in his eye guttered and died and left them as dead as your father's as he lay on that slab._

Yes! No! Fuck! _The bellow of a bull pierced by the matador's lance. You laced your finger behind your head and then let them drop to your sides again._ How am I to care for a child who cannot even talk? Or hear the danger that comes for her? Who thinks the world is an adventure, some game that will never hurt?

Nera is well aware of how cruel the world can be. Or have you forgotten that she spent twelve years of her life locked in a cell in the bowels of the world and drinking her own piss? _Cold as permafrost, and your heart howled for you to stop before you said words that could never be forgiven._

No, but she seems to have, _your fool's mouth blurted._

_You knew you were making a fool of yourself, wringing your hands like a hysterical fishwife over the ugly and inevitable necessities of war, but all you could see was your father, naked and livid on that cold metal slab, stinking of antiseptic and blood and the faint whiff of shit, his eyes sunken and dull and raccooned green-black. My hand, the skin thin as crepe, trembling in yours as I gazed at my son, but my voice steady as threaded steel as I nodded and told the disinterested young policeman with the steno book in his rosy, living hand that yes, this was my Alexander._

Why is it that everyone I love is so eager to die? _you snarled, and turned your back before you could see the bewildered disgust in his eyes. Or worse yet, the amusement._

Kirill, _he said softly._ Look at me. _A Cossack soothing a spooked horse._

_But you did not. You could not, ashamed as you were that you had exposed a truth you had never meant to admit, even to yourself. All you could see was your father, cold and stiffening in the grimy Moscow morgue. A letter in a drawer, its writing yellowing and faded, all that was left of the mother you so longed to see again. Just hollow words on brittle paper that felt like a relic of atrocity between your fingers, as if words could ever satisfy the void she left behind. The open door of Viko's SUV outside that bodega, and that bag of tampons and chocolate and stupid stuffed animals baking on the asphalt._

_The rustle of heavy bedclothes._ Kirill. _More rustling and a soft footfall._

_The specter of Siberius falling on his face and undoing the tank's miraculous work prompted you to turn. Practicality, not sentiment, you told yourself. You found him with one foot on the floor and the other sliding from beneath the blankets, a caterpillar working itself free of its cocoon. His lips were a thin, bloodless line of grim determination, and he trembled with the effort as he struggled against the blankets._

_His weakness sent your heart into your throat. It was perverse, against the rules of life with Siberius as you had begun to know and savor it, and you wished you could piss on the former Lord Marshall's corpse. You bared your teeth and lunged at him._

What the fuck do you think you're doing? _You seized him by the arms and wrangled him back into the bed._ Stupid fucking bastar-

 _His hands rose to cradle your face, long fingers and cool palms, and surely, surely, he felt the heat of your anger in your cheeks, but he only smiled._ Kirill. _A prayer breathed over the beads of a rosary, sacred as the name of God himself._ You are loved beyond all measure of the world. Do you not know this? Have I failed to show you? _He closed his eyes for so long that you thought he had succumbed to the persistent tug of unconsciousness, but they opened again at last._ Forgive me.

_You were so stunned by his quiet, gentle declaration in the face of your fury, the serene certainty of it, that you offered no resistance as he pulled you into a kiss. He tasted of iron and copper and long sleep, and as his breath mingled with yours, you finally understood why Viko had given himself so happily to a life of dogs and children and cutting the crabgrass on sweltering Sunday afternoons._

Lovelovelove. _It washed over you like anointing oil, and your heart thundered giddily against your ribs, a sparrow soaring high on the summer winds, the sun warm upon its back. You reached for him with too-light hands, and your breath was a warm, plosive rush against your upper lip. You pressed yourself against him, a cat arching into the stroke of a tender hand._

 _He laughed against your mouth._ If I were but stronger... _he said as he broke the kiss, exhausted and fond and struggling against the tide of oncoming sleep._ Did you truly not know? _His brow furrowed._

I hoped, _you thought._ But I have learned that hope is a dangerous blade that cuts too deeply to be cherished for long. And the scars it leaves are long. _But that was one vulnerability too many, and to speak it might curse this moment of bliss that was never meant for a man such as you, and so you said only,_ Sssshhh, ssshh. You need to eat. And drink. Fucking is for later.

I need to piss, he rumbled, and shifted beneath you.

Pissing was good; pissing was a sign of a body trying to function as it ought. You allowed yourself another kiss, another lingering caress, and then you eased yourself off of him and went in search of a temporary toilet. Siberius scowled when you brought him a wrought silver chalice, but he didn't protest when you pointed out that he was too weak to walk on his own, and worry fluttered low in your belly.

I hope you don't expect me to drink from it after, _was all he said when he plucked it from your hand._

_No piss passed his dry, sticky lips, but you did ply him with water and call for more stew and black bread. For you, you told the steward, lest he entertain ideas of knocking off his vulnerable Lordship with a dose of poison, and when it came you fed it to him in small, slow bites and prayed it would not be too hard on his mending insides. It was a tenderness your father would have abhorred and of which you had thought yourself long incapable, and you savored it, savored the chance to be human, the man you might have been in another life where you weren't broken by your own father and abandoned to the hands of harder men still._

_You spent a week among the Necromonger horde, the people of Siberius' forging, and through it all, you waited for all the possibilities that had opened up before you to be snatched away just as your dreams of architecture school and a reunion with your mother and brother had been. For Siberius to grow drunk on the limitless power now set before him and go back on his promise to help you find Viko. For him to decide that the slender hope of a life with you was a child's daydream compared to the wealth, power, and thrill of conquest that he now held in his hands. Why go with you when he could rule a thousand worlds and fuck anyone he wanted with a look and a nod? You were nothing, a skinny Russian street rat with enough military training to make you a threat to the weak and the stupid, but not enough to reshape the world. You were a cog in a decaying machine with nothing to offer but your smart mouth and your trigger finger and your overused prick. Why would a man who could reach out and slap the face of God without fear of retribution stay with you?_

_And yet he did. Seven days he stayed, and on the seventh day, the day they celebrated his accession to the head of an army that would make the mightiest of the Motherland tremble, he slipped a tranquilizer into the wine and waited for the court to drop where they sat, slumping into their puddings and cuts of beef and slithering to the floor in slack, crumpled heaps, and while they snored into their own spittle, you loaded the choicest bits of their treasury into a ship stuffed with food and left his glory and a reservoir of bitterness and loathing behind. From colossus astride a galaxy of worlds to a hunted man with a single choice._

_And he chose you._

Yes, and for that leap of faith, he had been rewarded with abduction by government suits while his purported love had stood there with his dick in his hand and let them take them away. No big house, no hot meal and a bottle of wine, no celebratory fuck in a bed with clean, cool sheets, just a long ride in a car with blacked-out windows and heavy soundproofing and an extended stay in one America's finer black ops detention facilities, stripped and scrutinized by prying eyes and invasive hands and interrogated for hours under lights designed to blind and disorient. And he has no doubt that, like their Russian cousins, over whom they so piously claimed the moral high ground, they used Nera against him.

Nothing was so cruel a weapon as love.

 _Was it worth it, Sibrochka?_ he wonders as he listens to Nera snuffle and hum in her sleep. _Was_ I _worth it?_

 _Such a stupid question,_ his father sneers, the vodka thick and astringent on his tongue, and he blinks at him with bleary, bloodshot malevolence, the half-empty glass sloshing between spidery, unsteady fingers. _You have been given the answer many times now, and still you do not accept. From your mother, who did not fight for you, who never lifted a finger to look for you even after I was dead. From your grandmother, who died and left you with nothing but old rosaries and dusty Bibles and rotting afghans. By your superiors, who cut you from their ranks like so much diseased flesh the moment you were no longer a convenient means to clean up their most embarrassing piles of shit. Hell, your own brother, the other half of your soul as all the poets and doe-eyed fools would call him, took the word of men he would trust in nothing else and ended his search for you at an empty grave. Mike tells you he mourned, but what else would a wife say? Tears are the mark of cowards and children, and no matter how many he might've shed over his high-class imported whiskey or into his wife's merrily-bobbing tits, he moved on without a backward glance, happy to fuck his wife and raise his brats and suck the cock of his Uncle Sam to rise through the ranks of an organization that would gladly have pumped two bullets into the base of your skull if they hadn't thought it might be worth it to pick your brains before they blew them out and used a pressure washer to remove all trace of you from their tidy floor. Why would this man be any different simply because he shares your bed?_

 _Because,_ he thinks savagely, _he did what he said he would do. He promised me he would help me find Viko, and he did. He returned to the hell he tried so hard to escape and fought a man most thought a god. He offered up his most cherished prize, his helpless and trusting little bird, and shed his blood on a Necromonger's blade. He gave up unlimited power for the slenderest of hopes to find a man he did not know, and when we found him, he was by my side from the first shot to the last snapped neck, an avenging angel of wrath who poured himself out on my enemies as though they were his. He stayed when he did not have to, when he should have run, and that is more than I can say for any of you._

He thinks of William, standing idiotically in his driveway while the man who nursed him back to health one decent, delicious meal at a time was herded into an SUV like a steer into an abattoir.

"Do you trust me, Sibrochka?" he murmurs into the darkness, and skims his lips over the bare shoulder he can sense but cannot see. 

But Siberius does not stir, does not so much as twitch, and panic hardens to lead in his belly.

"Please, my love, please," he says. He slides unthinkingly into his mother tongue, the language of his childhood, the language of loss and of night terrors that went unacknowledged and unconsoled, of the awareness of an empty bed where his mirror image should be, and of the hollow void that had yawned, wide and relentless, behind his navel from the time William vanished from his life to the day he'd drifted in again, a phantom in a suit and tie dredged up by the eyes-only witchery of that cast-iron cunt Landy.

Nothing.

"Siberius!" he hisses, and jabs him in the ribs with the heel of his palm.

Not so much as a grunt.

 _Stop,_ he tells himself. _You're overreacting. He's just sleeping off the sedative and a shit introduction to his new homeland._ It's all very logical, the cool, rational thought of a soldier, but the soldier is far away now, and all he can see is his father on that cold, metal slab, his skin cold and grey and flabby with early decomp and his eyes sunken and lightless in their bruised sockets. The face of the man who had summoned him from his classes to tell him that his grandmother had had a massive stroke over her pot of supper cabbage and died on the kitchen floor with blood oozing from her smashed nose. The bed that wasn't in the cramped, yellowing flat he'd shared with his father, and the haunting absence of so much of himself.

"Sibrochka!" A desperate snap, and he shoves his shoulder.

That earns him nothing but a boneless loll from Siberius, but there's an indignant honk from Nera's side of the fraternal divide, followed by a noxious vapor that makes his nostrils burn and the appearance of her tousled head, a disgruntled meerkat peering balefully from her burrow.

 _So sorry, but I think your brother might be dead,_ he thinks hysterically, but says nothing. He doubts she can see his hands in the dark, and besides, all knowledge of her soundless tongue has been swept from his mind by the unreasoning certainty of his loss.

When no answer is forthcoming, Nera gives an elegant harrumph and slithers from beneath the sheets.

"Where are you going?' he asks stupidly.

She, of course, pays him no mind and busies herself with the business of decamping to the roomier, less volatile confines of the floor, which is conveniently devoid of squirming, restless assholes.

 _And corpses,_ his mind supplies helpfully.

He drops all pretense of restraint. "Sibrochka!" It's a yowl, a tiger caught in a flaying snare, and he tugs him upright.

At first, his head only lolls grotesquely on the stem of his neck, as though unseen hands from the dreaming lands had snapped it while he had fretted and stewed like a dithering old woman, but then it wobbles upright. Siberius' chest heaves, and his eyelids slowly open, wallpaper peeled from mildewed mansion walls.

"What is it?" he croaks, and then his nose catches a whiff of Nera's bout of gastrointestinal distemper. "Did you decide to share the wealth?" It's so plaintive and peevish that he's tempted to laugh, but that might be misinterpreted as a bit of dumbassery not to be tolerated by someone just awoken from his peaceful slumber. 

"You wouldn't wake up." Hurled like an accusation, and oh, yes, that is so much better.

"I didn't want to wake up," Siberius counters, and blinks at him in sleepy bewilderment.

"You wouldn't wake up." As if stubborn repetition can explain the terrified muddle of his thoughts.

Siberius sighs and pulls him down. "My Russian princeling," he rumbles, and his arms encircle him.

"I don't want to be coddled like a gassy infant," he grouses, but his resistance is minimal, and he's only too happy to accept the kiss Siberius offers as a sop to his nettled ego. It's soft and cool and sloppy, as though Siberius' world has blurred and gone soft at the edges, absinthe and moonlight and polished silver, but he takes it, chases it, in fact, because a kiss is a sign of life.

"Of course you don't," Siberius agrees, but he doesn't let go. His head drifts to the pillow, and his eyelids droop. "'M fine."

 _The fuck you are,_ he wants to counter. _Your eyes are glassy, and you can't keep them open and your speech is slurred. Drugged out your ass is what you are._ But he doesn't want to hold him here by anger, to goad and prod and demand as his father had often done, hard and inflexible in the face of human frailty.

"'S all right, _ma atet nin._ The faintest of whispers. Siberius' legs shift sluggishly beneath the sheets and entrap his own. He opens his eyes with an effort and fixes them on his face as best he can. "I am all right, I promise. Sleep now." Fingers caress his nape and skim over the back of his head.

Would that he could. Siberius slips away almost immediately, body going slack and heavy beneath him and fingers falling away to rest on the mattress like a felled thrush, but he can only watch. It should be easy to follow him; the steady, muffled thunder of his heartbeat should soothe him into dreamless sleep, but all he can think is that it's too slow, strained and struggling against the unknown and alien drugs never meant for his system.

 _He's dying,_ he thinks helplessly. _The calculations they used are meant for humans. They either didn't know he wasn't, or they didn't give a shit, and now he's dying one breath at a time won't even know it until he wakes up in the afterlife._

 _Don't leave me,_ he thinks frantically. _I can't take another surprise fuck you from the universe._

 _Care for him then,_ his grandmother suggests with infuriating reasonableness.

 _I don't care for things; I shoot them,_ he retorts. _Besides, how can I? I'm not a doctor, and I can't cook._

 _No,_ she agrees, and clucks her tongue. _You would probably kill them faster._

 _Oh, shut up, old woman._ He thinks of the man with the impassive face in the doorway of his classroom, a grim reaper come to crush the last fragile vestiges of his boyhood, and of the cloying, sulphurous stink of overboiled cabbage as he'd packed his bags and headed for a life as no one's child.

He has to do something. He can't just lie here and wait for the slow rise and fall of Siberius' chest to stutter and still, and for cool to grow cold and hard as marble. Siberius had cared for him on the days when the pain in his head had swollen and throbbed and reduced him to a whimpering, writhing animal who could only lie in the shadows and pray for the temporary respite of unconsciousness or the obliterating finality of a hemorrhage. He had brewed tea and made soup, and he, too, had been a soldier, stripped of all time for leisure. If he could do it, then how hard could it be?

A snort from his grandmother. _Says a man._

 _I'm going to use one of your recipes, too,_ he counters peevishly.

 _Demon boy,_ she mutters darkly, but there's a hint of fondness in it that warms his chest and makes his jaw ache.

Fish soup, he thinks. Siberius and Nera are unabashed gluttons for anything seafood, would happily stuff themselves to bursting for it, and he dimly recalls a soup Babu had often made for him during the long, bitter winters, savory and rife with chunks of fish and fat shrimp. He wasn't exactly sure what _kind_ of fish she'd favored, but it was white and firm, and anyway, he doubted Siberius and Nera were picky.

 _Well on your way to poisoning them, I see,_ his grandmother notes.

He rolls his eyes. _As long as it's not rancid, they'll live._

_Such standards you have, boy._

It would be fine. He would make it fine. Michelle had to have some cookbooks somewhere, some dusty old monstrosity that had been a wedding gift from a spinster aunt with more notions of domestic propriety than a grasp on the reality of her no-bullshit niece, and even if she didn't, there was always the Internet. If you could find recipes to make your own goddamn Semtex, then you could find one for fish soup, or stew, or anything warm and filling that would go down their grateful gullets.

He disentangles himself from Siberius' embrace, expecting all the while to be resisted and remonstrated with by strong arms and a voice thick with sleep, but there isn't so much as a twitch or a hum, and his stomach drops.

 _Please be all right,_ he thinks as he slides out of bed and stands over the rumple of sheets and blinks down at him. _Don't make me have to live without you, too. I am already full of too many holes._

His fingers itch with the impulse to stroke his face and card through his hair, and his lips tingle with the need to kiss him, to bend down and press their lips together and breathe life into him until his eyes flutter open in sleepy wonderment and he pulls him into an inviting tangle of the limbs and the unhurried ecstasy of a slow fuck, proof of life in the silver hours of the moon.

 _Love has made you weak and sentimental,_ his father sneers, and for a moment, the hatred is so complete that it blinds him. For his father, yes, but also for his own sneaking belief in the venom that he spits, and for the fact that it is this impulse to obedience that he obeys.

 _Which one of us ended up on the slab, you bastard?_ he thinks savagely as he spins away. _You ran from your weakness and died anyway. I am still here._

_And still the good little soldier I have made you._

_Go fuck yourself,_ he wants to howl, but he refuses to grant him the satisfaction, and so he pushes him aside and summons memories of a soup that tasted of home and security and slips up the stairs to begin his latest mission.


	2. The Keeper of Her Castle

Life with William Cooper has never been dull, but as she stands on the threshold of her kitchen with sleep grit in her eyes and the unraveled threads of pleasant dreams in her head and watches her brother-in-law root through her pots and pans like a weasel gliding through the unbridled delights of an unguarded chicken coop, she wonders just when it became a circus. 

He's so focused on his mission, whatever the hell it is, that he doesn't register her presence. She watches as he eases open another cupboard and peers into its murky depths, fingers curled loosely around the artfully-tarnished knob of the cabinet. Now that her ears have emerged from the depths of a sleep so rudely interrupted, she can hear him muttering under his breath, though she can't understand a word. It's Russian, she thinks, or German, or some odd agglomeration of the two that makes sense only to former FSB assets skulking around someone's house in the middle of the night.

That she hasn't pinged his radar yet surprises her. Normally, his vigilance borders on the paranoid; hell, it _had_ careened into it after William's abduction, his nocturnal prowls through every room and incessant perimeter checks of the yard a nervous, restive compulsion that had made her skin itch and her throat tighten and burn with the impulse to scream until the windows shattered and the ceiling blossomed into a kaleidoscope of craze lines, the joists pushing through the drywall like bones through skin. Every day and every night, the same obsessive, inexhaustible circuit, and sometimes when even that couldn't dispel the nightmare scenarios he'd conjured in his head, he'd filled a Thermos full of coffee and followed the kids to school, where he'd parked across the street and surveiled the campus through bloodshot eyes, watching over the only parts of William that he had left.

_Uncle Kirill smells like B.O.,_ Tatiana had announced uncharitably one afternoon at pickup, her backpack slung over her shoulder, and Drushka, who normally let everything roll over him like so much inconsequential water, had turned with startling suddenness and punched her in the arm.

_Shut up,_ he'd spat, furious and sullen, and slouched in his seat with a desultory squeak of leather.

_Andrew Philip Cooper!_ she'd exclaimed, shocked by his outburst, but she'd been rattled by the tears in his eyes and the vicious misery on his small, pinched face in the instant before he'd turned his gaze to the window.

_He looks like Kirill,_ she'd thought with dismal bewilderment, and then Tatiana had burst into loud, demonstrative tears.

_He's trying to take care of us,_ Andrew had mumbled to the window, and that was the last he'd said on the subject. He hadn't even raised a defense when she'd taken away his gaming privileges for six weeks. He'd simply nodded and grunted in affirmation when she'd asked him if he'd understood why he was being punished, and then he'd shuffled to the couch and stared dumbly at the screen, face closed and eyes blank and numbly indifferent to Tatiana's crowing triumph at justice so swiftly and ruthlessly meted out.

And there and thus he had remained until Kirill had come in fifteen minutes later with an empty Thermos and a bag of groceries no one needed. Then he'd been up and across the room in three strides, and he'd buried his face in Kirill's midsection. Kirill had blinked at her in consternation, but his face had softened infinitesimally when he'd looked down at the unruly mop of her son's hair.

_Is okay, Drushka,_ he'd muttered gruffly, and she'd had to swallow a bark of laughter at the thought that he'd somehow made words of comfort sound like the quiet but certain promise of violence. Then he'd shifted his Thermos from one hand to the other and ruffled his nephew's hair, and it had taken all of her resolve not to burst into ridiculous tears at the panicky ferocity of her son's answering hug.

_What the hell are you doing?_ she wonders as she watches him release the cabinet knob and slip his hand into the recesses of the cupboard. The muted clank and jangle of molested cookware provokes a vigorous round of dark, unintelligible imprecations, and his hand emerges with a stainless steel saucepan in its grasp.

"What the hell are you doing?" It's loud in the furtive silence of the kitchen, and she suspects it's only belated recognition of her voice that keeps him from turning and throwing his ill-gotten gain at her head.

Instead, his head snaps around. "Michelle." A furtive squeak as he tightens his grip on the saucepot. "Did I wake you?"

She snorts. "'Did I wake you?' No, I just thought I'd take a moonlight stroll through my kitchen at ass o'clock in the morning. Of course you woke me up." She cinches the belt of her robe and shuffles into the kitchen proper to turn on the light with an irritable slap.

Kirill's shoulders slump, and he blinks against the sudden flood of light. "That was not my intent," he says, and lifts the pot to cradle it with his arm.

"It's ass o'clock in the morning," she reminds him with bleary vehemence. "What the hell are you doing raiding my pots and pans?" She sounds shrill even to her own ears, but her head throbs in time to her heartbeat, and she's feverish for want of sleep.

Kirill, cocksure, swaggering, shit-eating-grin Kirill, quails, a child staring into the face of the bogeyman.

_Or maybe a father with an upraised belt,_ she thinks, unbidden, and in her mind's eye, she sees William after his return from Russia and his search for Kirill, slumped on the couch with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and his eyes gone shiny and red from the rapidly-diminishing contents.

_'S not fair,_ he'd slurred softly, the first time she'd ever heard him so drunk that the words weren't as crisp as the creases in his pants.

_I know,_ she offered helplessly, and reached out to smooth his hair.

William had taken a long pull from the bottle and blinked at her with owlish avidity, his eyes glassy and earnest inside his face. _You don' un'erstand,_ he'd said earnestly, and the bottle had sloshed and yawed on his quadricep. _Dad was a prick to everybody when he was drunk, but he always seemed to have it in for Yusha._ He contemplated his bourbon, and his lips twisted into a wry grimace, as though the booze had gone sour and gritty in his mouth. _'S why he got to be so light and quick on his feet. Had to be to outrun that mean bastard._ A slow nod, as though he'd finally affirmed a long-held suspicion. Another pull from the bottle. _Think it was 'cause he had so much of our mother in him, believe it or not._ A shallow huff of amusement, but why had she suspected that it had tasted bitter as gall?

_He never caught a fucking break. I got Mom and America and the Corp, ooh rah, and he got life with the old man and the kindlier, friendlier, Gorby regime and a stint in the fucking Russian army._ An airy belch that he covered with the back of his hand. Even ripped, William Cooper was a gentleman. _And then what little fucking life he's got is wiped out by a fucking drunk on the highway._

His voice had caught and thinned on those last words, and she'd seen the wheels turning in his wasted head, grinding as he'd stared at the bottle in his hand and wondered if the driver of the car that had crossed the lines and obliterated the other half of his soul had been drinking the same before he'd gotten behind the wheel. His fingers had tightened spasmodically around the neck of the bottle, and she'd tensed, sure that he was about to hurl it across the room. But he'd merely leaned forward and set it on the edge of the coffee table with oddly persnickety care(missing the coaster, of course), and then he'd turned and fixed her with those lovely hazel eyes that so often turned her knees to water and made her heart flutter inside her chest, now watery and beseeching and lost.

_Yusha's gone,_ he'd said in a small, plaintive voice too young for his mouth. _What 'm I supposed to do now?_

_Is that you, Yusha?_ she thinks as he blinks at her, shoulders drawn up and her cribbed pot held against his chest, a child knight confronted by an unexpected dragon. _Is this who my William mourned for all those months--all those years--after he came home with the bitter knowledge of your "death" on his tongue like ashes and dust and squeezing his heart in a vise nothing I or the kids did could loosen? Is this who he saw when he nursed the bottle all night long, staring at the blank, dead screen of the TV and rubbing his palm over his knee as though its absent rhythm could banish the ghosts in his head? Or when he slipped from our bed to sit cross-legged in the doorway of one of the kids' room and watch them sleep? Or when I came home to an empty house and found him by the creek behind the house, knees drawn to his chest in his regulation black dress pants and his eyes fixed on the water, as though simple wanting could draw you from the ripples and bring you back to him?_

_This is what William would have looked like,_ she realizes with sudden clarity. _Ten years old and wandering through the house looking for his brother and wondering why his life had turned inside out in the blink of an eye. Looking up at his mother and loving her with all the ferocity William Cooper can muster and hoping she wasn't going to up and disappear, too._

It's a thought that makes a lump rise in her throat, but she'll be damned if she'll burst into tears in her own kitchen in the middle of the night like some hormonal hausfrau, so she retreats to the barren field of her fucks that she occupies during legal battles and asks, "Seriously, why are you raiding my kitchen?"

"I need to take care of them."

"Who? Siberius and Nera? Chr-" She wills herself to soften her tone. The man, did, after all, do what no one else could and bring William home. Battered and skinny and worryingly hoarse for a while, but alive and in one piece. "Didn't they just eat-" She glances at the clock in the stove. "-four hours ago?"

"I need to take care of them." A record caught in a groove, and when he realizes that this is not a terribly-convincing argument to put before a woman who routinely jousts with steel-balled suits in courtrooms and corporate conference rooms, he adds, "They're not-" He swallows with a dry click and shifts from one foot to the other. She's never seen him so rattled, and she isn't sure she likes it. "Their metabolisms are higher than ours at the best of times, and these-"

_Are not the best of times,_ she finishes silently. _Can't disagree with you there. This past week or so has been an absolute shitshow._ William, tossing and turning in the bed, terrified that choosing them had cost him his brother. William, pacing furiously in his socked feet, the hiss of cotton on hardwood matched only by the hiss of his words as he made phone call after desperate phone call, beseeching, cajoling, and occasionally imploring Tatiana, waspish and willful and brimming with a bewildered anger, staring balefully at her over her bowl of macaroni and cheese.

_When is Siberius coming back?_ An empress peering down her royal nose at an errant courtier. _I like his better. This is yucky._

_You've always loved that kind. It's your favorite._

_That was before,_ she'd replied sullenly, and looked at her like she was as though she were a particularly irritating dinner companion.

_Before what?_ she'd wondered dully as the silence had stretched and yawned between them, broken only by the disconsolate _chink_ of the tines of Andrew's fork against the bottom of his plate and the stolid sound of William chewing with grim determination. _Before you saw your daddy let the scary men take your new friend away? Before I herded you into the house after it was too late to unsee it so they wouldn't snatch you, too? Before you learned that daddies could disappear?_

_Eat your food,_ she'd said wearily, and thought that would be the end of it because Tati was stubborn and loud and fierce as a whirlwind, but she was always a good kid who knew a motherly order when she heard one.

_Oh, but you were in for a surprise, weren't you, Miss Hot Shit Cooper?_ sneers the sly, greasy voice of every tiny-dicked asshole she's ever had to best in a pissing contest. _Mama's little girl was no longer fooled by the illusion of Mommy and Daddy's infallibility, and oh, dear, wasn't she a chip off the old block?_

Or what? You'll have the bad men take me away, too? _she spat. Her chin jutted in defiance, and tears filled her eyes._

_Nothing she has ever said even in the deepest throes of a tantrum has ever cut so deeply. For a moment, all sound dropped from your world and your breath lodged in your throat, a cold, sharp pebble._

What did you say, young lady? _You meant for it to be the voice of God come to rebuke a wayward sinner, but all strength had left you, and it emerged a wavering rasp._

You heard me. _Every inch her mother's daughter, though Christ knows you'd never admit it, any more than you'd admit that some small part of you was absurdly proud._

_You looked to your husband for backup, but none was forthcoming. The cat had gotten his tongue, too, it seemed, and he and your son merely watched, spectators to this unexpected test of wills. A cynically-amused part of your brain wondered on whom Andrew had placed his wager. His eyes drifted from you to his sister and back again, and his tinking fork had frozen in place._

I think you need to go to your room. _It was less discipline than she deserved, but it was the best you could manage._

Fine, _came the sullen reply, and she gave her bowl a petulant shave. It skidded to the center of the table and came to a stop with an unceremonious thump._

Tatiana El-

Don't, _that oh-so-reliable man of yours cut in. It was a sudden bark, and you blinked at him in surprise because you were sure you'd clipped his balls off nice and neat a long time ago. Yet here he was, refusing to back you up._

_And oh, didn't_ that _raise your hackles? You rounded your lips in preparation for tearing a strip or two from his hide, and then you took a good look at him, and the words died in your throat. His face was as pale as the cheap t-shirt he was wearing, and his eyes were bruised and red-rimmed and haunted, as if he were seeing things he'd thought left behind._

Just go to bed, young lady. _You were suddenly exhausted, and brittle inside too-dry skin, and if your sister had kicked open the door at that moment and announced that she was springing you out of this domestic birdcage and heading for the coast, you'd've packed your bags without a backward glance. Your door, however, remained firmly in its moorings, and so you heaved a sigh that was embarrassingly close to a sob and tried not to notice that your husband's shirt hung off him in too many places. You listened to your darling daughter retreat down the hallway, a hearty_ kiss my ass _in every stomp, and there was only you and your too-skinny husband with too many bad thoughts festering in his head and a son who had lost all interest in the macaroni and cheese that had been just fine five minutes before. You weren't surprised when he asked to be excused after a few more half-hearted bites, or when G.I. Joe scrubbed his face with his hands, pushed back his chair, and shuffled from the scene of domestic bliss like a man twice his age. In fact, you thought as your family dissolved around you like a sweet dream ruined, it was about par for the course since Kirill had swept into your lives with nothing but a duffel bag, a few grungy shirts, and a diffident charm that somehow managed to lower the panties and open the cunts of too many women in three counties._

_Or had, anyway. It appears he likes a different cut altogether._ The crisp, self-satisfied rasp of merino wool as her adversary crossed his legs, and she wishes he were real so she could kick him in the well-waxed balls.

_He might be a pain in the ass, but he's also who brought William home,_ her sister reminds her with the gentle yet firm pragmatism of the doctor. _He ran to the ends of the earth and beyond to find him, and let's be real, he probably did things no sane human being would contemplate. Maybe they both did. Or all three of them if you count Kirill's new hunk. You'll probably never know, and thank God for it._

_And even before you used him to turn the universe inside out in the hunt for the love of your life, he tried to be the best uncle he could, even if that did mean sweating and stinking in an SUV across the street from their school and prowling the perimeter of the playground or the athletic compound like a lynx creeping from the depths of the forest to seek his supper of spoiled suburban children and asshole soccer coaches. It might be crazy, but I think he's doing the best he can, so cut him some slack, huh?_

She takes a deep breath and remembers the smell of William that first night in the cabin, when everything had seemed a fever dream. Woodsmoke and warm flannel and the astringent prickle of the cheap soap they'd scrounged from God knows where. The sweat of their entangled bodies, William kissed by the faintest whiff of her perfume.

"I get that you're a little wigged out right now," she says in a low, reasonable voice that she immediately hates, and Kirill snorts like a restless warhorse and retreats a step. "But I'm still not seeing why this can't wait. Are they awake? Are they asking for food? Because we've got some stuff, some canned soup left." She gestures to the cupboard.

He shakes his head and snarls, "No, it's not fucking good enough." Laughter spat like bitter phlegm at her feet. "Jesus, you don't understand."

The contempt stings, sand against raw, weeping flesh, and fury simmers in her belly like warm lead. She cinches the drawstring of her robe and steps forward, index finger held aloft like an epee. "You can just just cram that patronizing bullshit straight up your ass, do you hear me?" she hisses. "It is four o'clock in the fucking morning, and I am tired. I am tired of the fucking chaos in this goddamn house, and just once, just for one goddamn night since you came into this house, I would like a night of peace and quiet." 

It's only when Kirill's face goes suddenly and carefully blank that she realizes what she said, and her heart sinks into her toes. _Fuck._

_I'm sorry,_ she thinks as she watches a muscle in his jaw twitch. He steps away from her with pained delicacy, as though his bones have gone to blown glass, the saucepot held before him like a makeshift shield against her onslaught. _That's not what I meant. I'm just so damn tired, and you're not making any sense, and I just want five seconds to catch my breath._

Before she can put form to the words, footsteps sound from the hall, and as she braces for the inevitable appearance of a bleary-eyed child demanding to know just what has disturbed their slumber, she wonders if it would be an abdication of her motherly duties if she just folded to the floor in a good old-fashioned Victorian swoon.

She readies her tongue with the necessary platitudes, but it's not one of her children who emerges. It's William, hair mussed in a way that makes her mouth go dry and eyes alert inside his sleep-puffy face.

"What's goin' on in here?" he croaks, and blinks at the tableau of lunacy they must present, his brother clutching a pot as though it were the Hope diamond and his wife looming over him like some crazed harridan come to deliver divine judgment.

"Nothing," Kirill says coldly, but that only raises William's antenna, and he looks to her in wordless inquiry. 

"I have outstayed my welcome," Kirill reports with a robotic equanimity that makes her skin crawl.

William blinks, a befuddled owl. "Wh-?

_J'accuse!_ her conscience howls, and she thinks of powdered wigs with tidy, beribboned plaits, and ruffled collars beneath thin, rouged lips and narrow, aquiline noses and eyes that blaze with righteous fervor.

"I did not!" she cries against the unspoken accusation. "I heard a bunch of rustling in the kitchen and thought it might be one of the kids looking for some water or trying to sneak some ice cream. Instead, I find him trying to steal our pots."

"I am not trying to steal them," Kirill counters. "I just needed them to cook something."

"Since when do you cook?" William demands, and his sleepy exasperation would be funny if she weren't so tired, so brittle beneath the skin and so unsure of the ground beneath her feet. He turns his attention to her. "And you heard a noise and didn't wake me up?"

The tacit questioning of her competence is one indignity too many. "Oh, fuck you, William. I'm not some damsel in distress. I can take care of myself. I did it for eight months, in case you've forgotten."

An ugly silence descends on the kitchen, as sudden and crushing as a rock slide, and the naked hurt on William's face in the instant before it closes as coldly and efficiently as his brother's sucks the air from her lungs.

_I didn't mean that! I didn't mean that, either,_ she thinks with wild despair. _Christ, I can't even control my own mouth anymore. All the words are too sharp, laced with blood and poison. It's like your brother brought the looking glass with him, and we all tumbled headlong into a terrible Wonderland where the Mad Hatter was crowned king._

"No, I didn't forget," he says flatly. "Don't think I'm gonna be doing that for a long time."

_It wasn't supposed to be this way,_ she thinks dismally, and fights the urge to fold her arms across her middle and sink to the floor like a dying naiad. _I was supposed to get you back and live happily ever after and go back to raising the kids and paying the bills and refereeing the squabbles between you and Kirill over when it was acceptable to dislocate a guy's kneecap in a crowded nightclub. Family barbecues and school plays and weekend soccer matches and the annual awkward holiday dinner with my parents and sister and her latest bad idea. The bad dream was supposed to be over, so why does it feel like I never woke up?_

She opens her mouth to apologize, to salve the wound she has inflicted, but William turns away from her.

_Dismissed._ As if she were an interloper, of no more importance than the backsplash over the range.

_Just a stupid little woman in her stupid little kitchen,_ she thinks, and suddenly, she's furious. Anger seethes low in her belly, cramping and dirty and urgent as the whisper of oncoming dysentery, and she's tempted to fly at William, this man she has promised to love, honor, and cherish until death does them part, and harrow his face with her nails until weals rice to the surface like stigmata and pummel him with her fists until he's as battered and bruised and dazed as she is, spitting blood from between swollen lips and struggling to make sense of a world turned inside out.

Matters are not improved when Kirill, still clutching _her_ pot, she notes with irrational venom, spares her an uneasy sidelong glance and mutters, "Not here."

William grunts, acknowledgment, she supposes, and launches into German, a language he knows she does not understand.

"Fuck you!" she spits. "Fuck you both."

She registers William's expression of startled incredulity even as she turns on her heel and stalks toward the yet unspoiled sanctity of their bedroom.

"Mike," she hears from behind her, plaintive and quavering, a Cape Cod widow watching her only son rush headlong into the sea that claimed his father, but she's too tired and furious to care. Her nostrils flare, and she dimly realizes that she's cinching her belt in a throttling grasp, an executioner at her garrote.

The desperate, muffled thud of footsteps behind her, and fingers snag the collar of her robe in a bid to stay her progress. She bares her teeth in a feral snarl, and it's a near thing that she doesn't turn into the body behind her and drive her knee into his undefended balls.

"What the fuck do you want?" It's the high, dangerous growl of a cornered wildcat, and her fingers tighten spasmodically around the fabric of her belt.

"Mike." It's William, quiet and thick and without a hint of his customary swagger. He's almost creeping as he approaches, and he reaches for her as though she were a creature of thistle and glass. "Mike," he murmurs, fragile and reverent.

She resists the urge to recoil from his tremulous caress. "What?" Never has a single syllable felt so heavy on her tongue.

William straightens with an audible crack of spine and steps nearer, though he makes no effort to draw her to him. Even at ass o'clock, he knows better, and she supposes it's that fine sense of self-preservation that has so often kept him alive and brought him home. He swallows with a dry click, and he presses a warm palm to her cheek with such tenderness that she swallows a moan.

_You don't have the right,_ she thinks. _You don't have the right to make me love you so much when all I want to do is hate your guts._

"What?" It's the only word of which she is capable, faint and brittle, as though she were a doll whose voice box has gotten caught in a single worn groove.

William's other had rises to cup her other cheek, and he presses his forehead to hers. It's warm with anguish and the last vestiges of broken sleep, and so familiar that her chest throbs.

_Will. My Will,_ her heart cries, and her anger, so righteous and comforting, wavers.

"I know," he breathes hoarsely against the bridge of her nose. "I know." 

_You don't know!_ she wants to howl. _What do you know?_ But what emerges is, "It's my house, William! My house," in a strangled, lost squeak she thought she'd left behind long ago with her love of Barbies and pink ribbons.

He does pull her into his arms then, and she sinks into the warm familiarity of them. "I know," he says. "These past few days have been crazy for everybody. Hey, at least his wall is obsessing over a pot and not burning down the agency." He chuckle hopefully, but there is no amusement to be wrung from her, and when she doesn't respond, he quiets. "He's trying, Mike," he offers in a whisper meant to stymie prying ears. "This whole giving a shit about somebody else thing is uncharted territory for him, and he just spent four days thinking they were gone forever."

"He cares about you," she points out. Her anger is fading, soothed by the solidity of her husband's body against her own and the still-sharp memory of the vast emptiness of their bed in those months without end.

"Yeah, well, he kind of has to. I'm him, only better-looking."

A flat "Fuck you," drifts from the kitchen. So much for a private conversation.

William huffs in amusement. "Christ, Yusha," he mumbles fondly, and then he steps back and gazes down at her. "Look, he's emotionally maxed-"

_He's_ emotionally maxed?" she echoes incredulously, and gapes up at him, her anger revived for one last hurrah. _I'm_ emotionally maxed. Jesus Christ, William, I'm your wife. At what point do I figure into this equation?"

His eyes widen, and the hard mask of the Marine falls away to reveal the man beneath, soft-eyed and yearning and oh-so-afraid of losing everything. "You and the kids are everything. You know that. You have to know that." Pleading now. "But your breaking point and Kirill's are two different things. You break, and you punch me in the balls and take me for all I'm worth and leave me to become a sad wino, rummaging through garbage for my meals and living in my car. He breaks, and maybe our one-eyed grandkids get to read about what it was like before we all lived under a mushroom cloud."

"That's a bit extreme, don't you think?"

"No," he answers, and the blunt immediacy of it makes her skin prickle.

"He needs this," he says quietly. "Whatever this is. So I'm gonna take him wherever he needs to go to do whatever he needs to do, and I'll do my best to keep him from burning down the kitchen."

"William!" she says alarmed. "That's not funny."

"Probably not," he admits. "But I'm still gonna try."

"You need sleep, not to be driving to the grocery store before the sun is even up. Besides, most of the specialty departments won't be up and running until seven or eight."

"We all need a lot of things." He's so tired, and she knows that if she could see him clearly, there would be bruises beneath his eyes and fine lines in the corners, hairline fractures in his facade left by his captors, a permanent reminder that he is mortal after all.

"Will..." _Don't go. Don't get in the car. If you do, I'm going to get another knock at the door, and this time, there will be no happy ending, no chance that God decided to take it back. There'll just be a state trooper with his hat in his hands and empty sympathy on his lips, and for the rest of my days, I'll remember the glint of the sun on his badge and the veins on the backs of his hands as he kneads the brim of his hat._ I'm sorry, ma'am, _he'll say, and that's as far as he'll get before my hearing throws up the white flag of_ fuck it _and the world goes grey at the edges and the only thing holding me up is the shiny brass doorhandle I insisted on when the ink on the deed was barely dry and the house still smelled of fresh paint and new hardwood. The trooper will return his hat to his head and leave me with nothing but the hole he's just torn in my life, and I'll be the one who has to wake up the kids and tell them that the daddy they just got back is gone again, and this time, he won't be coming back because he's sprawled at the bottom of an embankment next to their equally-gone uncle and the twisted wreckage of the car he should never have been driving._

But that's an argument for which neither of them has the strength, and so she holds the thought beneath her tongue and looks up at him in mute entreaty.

He musters a wan smile. _I know._ "It's not far," he says. "And there won't be much traffic at this time of day. Well, morning, I guess. Besides, I've driven on less sleep."

Only he would think that comforting. _Dammit, William._

He slides his hands to her shoulders and rubs them with his thumbs in slow circles. "I-just let me do this for him. We'll get back, I'll help him save the day and not set the kitchen on fire, and then we can laze around all day."

"You say that like the kids won't be up with the sun." The thought makes her want to burst into helpless, exhausted tears.

He shrugs. "Let 'em. I'll probably be up with Martha Stewart back there-"

An outraged squawk from the kitchen.

-safeguarding our peaceful retirement," he finishes. "You just go back to sleep." He presses a kiss to her forehead.

As if she could. She thinks of a trooper, his hat in his hands and the uneasy scuffle of his boots against the tasteful red Colonial brick of her front stoop.

"Besides," he says in a sly, roguish whisper, "Maybe once things settle down, we should think about Bali."

Bali. That prompts a wistful smile. Bali had been their muzzy, happy daydream in the early days of their courtship, when they had been love-doped and blind to everything but each other and the sex had been fierce and frequent, a tangle of limbs and sheets and sweat and teeth, the bedsprings in open-throated, primal howl, an unapologetic declaration of their union. They'd spoken of it in hushed tones in the sleepy, sated silence of after, murmured it into each other's sweat-damp skin as their fingers traced idle patterns in flesh so recently worshipped. There had been no concrete plans, no clear vision, just the hope of sand and surf and rummy cocktails that warmed the belly and spiced the lips and turned the world to tallow at the edges, soft and illusory as the promise of tomorrow. And because there had been no children yet to distend her belly and widen her hips and lower her breasts and leave stretch marks in their wake like the mark of a passing god, she had envisioned string bikinis insubstantial as candyfloss and coconut oil rubbed into flawless, golden skin by William's avid hands.

But the someday of Bali had never come. Instead, there had been an engagement ring whose price William still refuses to divulge and a wedding paid for by her parents and a too-short honeymoon at a sweet little bed-and-breakfast in Roanoke so as not to disappoint her bosses at the firm or his minders at the agency, who thought such things were irksome frivolities to be endured and politely congratulated and then quickly set aside in favor of more important matters. Mortgage payments and paint swatches for the nursery they had not expected to need and hurried, muffled sex frequently interrupted by the high, thin cries of a dirty diaper or the needy patter of little feet, come to impart news of a bad dream or a wet bed. The dream of Bali and its drinks and its coconut oil and its unhurried fucks to the rhythm of the surf had dimmed into a half-remembered dream of youth, buried beneath car payments and PTA meetings and half-hearted masturbation in the shower while the TV in the bedroom sang its idiot lullaby of mayhem and loss and endless, grubbing greed.

She doubts it will come now. Even if it does, it will not be the dream of their carefree youth. Their bodies have changed, and their minds, and though they might yet run hand-in-hand down the beach at sunset with the sea breeze in their hair and the sand a warm caress between their toes, they will not run as fast as they once might have done, and her thoughts will turn, not to the alluring flex and stretch of William's thighs in his shorts, but to the faded white webbing of her stretch marks and the children who put them there. She will sip her cocktails and wonder if she should call her parents to check in on the kids one more time, and the spice of rum on her lips will spark a furtive shame, as though she has partaken of something forbidden and violated the sanctity of motherhood with her unseemly hedonism. They will both listen for the strident chirp and burr of their phones, summoning them home to sudden calamity or the pressing demands of insatiable masters, and back in their suite, as William does his best to work his magic between her thighs, she will wonder if the moonlight has been so kind as to hide her softening belly and her stretch marks and the faint stippling of incipient cellulite that has begun to make itself known on her ass.

The Bali that was can never be, but she cannot bring herself to say this to the man she loves and whom she had so nearly lost. He's looking at her with such earnestness, hopeful that this wispy olive branch from their past carries enough balm within it to begin the quiet work of healing. She cannot bring herself to crush that hope, not when he has so often loved her so well. She's not sure he could stand the blow, fragile as he is beneath his skin. Even as she holds him, she is too aware of the hard plane of his chest and the sharp spars of his shoulder blades. So she swallows her doubt and tightens her grip.

"I'm going to hold you to that," she says, and feels the scrape of an olive branch against her palm.

He beams at her. "I'm gonna hold you to me," he growls, and pulls her in for a kiss. His lips are warm, almost feverish, but her hearts soars because it's her William, battered and dry-mouthed but alive and fighting for this life that they have made, and as his breath washes over the bridge of her nose, she remembers why she said yes to him all those years ago when he'd asked for her hand with eyes as big as pie plates and a hand not quite steady as it held up a small, velvet box.

"Go on," she says when the kiss breaks. "The sooner you go, the sooner you can get some rest."

He gives her a jaunty, two-finger salute. "Yes, ma'am. I'll be back to help with the kids," he promises.

_Like hell you will,_ she thinks. _The only place you're going is straight to fucking bed._ But this, too, she keeps to herself. She merely offers a noncommittal hum and shoos him toward the kitchen and Kirill's incessant, impatient prowling, and as she shuffles down the hallway to check on the kids, she allows herself to dream of Bali, and of a stroll down a white-sugar beach with the sand between her toes.


	3. The Tinpot Confessional

He knows it's the exhaustion that has pushed him to the brink of delirium, but as he slumps in the driver's seat of the family SUV and wills his fingers to curl around the imitation-leather steering wheel, William can't shake the feeling that Kirill is ten years old again, that a mischievous eldritch god born of the same hard, cold soil from whence he had sprung had recognized its own and taken pity on him by sloughing the years from his bones. He's splayed in the passenger seat, his right foot bobbing up and down so quickly that William has to suppress a watery belch and close his gritty, burning eyes against a wave of dizziness. He's holding his cellphone so tightly that the casing creaks, and his shoulders hunch as he peers down at the small screen bright as God's truth.

William's eyes throb and sting, and only the doubt that he has the coordination or the will to return them to the wheel keeps him from rubbing them with fingers that feel like they've bailed on this most uncomfortable of bodily unions.

_He looks like he did when we were kids and he'd found some scraggly, half-blind kitten shivering and mewling behind our garbage can or huddled in some ditch. The kid who'd happily rabbit-punch me in the dick or try to knock my teeth out during our scuffles would suddenly be all furrowed brow and pinch-mouthed concern as he squatted over some tiny, keening creature denied God's grace. His grungy, creased sneakers would crunch and scrape on the grit of dirt and crumbling concrete beneath his soles, and a muscle in his jaw would twitch as the kitten sent out its mournful distress call and wobbled toward the shadow that loomed over it with the desperation of no other choice._

_A dirty-nailed finger would descend toward a small, sniffing nose._

Don't touch it, _I'd always say, but Kirill never listened. His mind was made up the moment he saw that pile of fur._

We can't just leave it, Viko _he'd declare, and shoot me a withering glower that clearly said I was a raging, heartless asshole, and what could I say? Maybe I was; assholery and ruthless pragmatism often come to the same thing in the end, and laissez-faire and go fuck yourself feel awfully damn similar when it's you lying on the pavement with nothing but the hope of somebody else's give-a-shit._

_That's a little lesson you learned for yourself not too long back, isn't it?_ muses a dry, red-mouthed voice at the base of his brain, and Cynthia flashes through his mind, cold and confident and sure of her control right up to the moment he'd raised his gun and put three center mass.

_Cooper, this is going to happen with or without you._ Unflinching as the winter wind, regnat ascendant, and his arm had prepared for the movement while the words still hung in the air like unformed frost, because he had known then, even if she hadn't, that she meant to kill him, too. Once he let Frank Moses and Sara die, he would be just another loose end to be tied up, another risk neither she nor Dunning could afford to take. Maybe they'd shoot him in the warehouse as soon as he'd mopped up their shit and call him another unfortunate casualty of Moses' rampage, or maybe he'd make it as far as the car before they wrapped a length of piano wire around his neck and held on until he stopped kicking and the air soured with the earthy, jungle-rot reek of his shit. Either way, he would never see Mike or the kids again, and all they would have to remember him by would be a dry letter of condolence signed by the woman who'd orchestrated his death and been richly rewarded for it and an urn full of ashes with his name engraved on the nameplate. His love for them had been a fierce and savage flame far brighter than that for his country, so soiled and despoiled by the movers and shakers who signed his checks every two weeks, and so he had chosen without hesitation and without regret. 

_So you say, Cooper,_ Cynthia says inside his head, and her lips curl into a humorless smile, red-lipped and predatory, a jaguar crouched over her kill. _And yet, here I sit, big as life and twice as comfortable. Let's face it: I take up a whole lot of real estate inside your head, and there's always room to expand._

He thinks of Cynthia's sister at her funeral, hunched and wan and engulfed by her winter coat as she stood beneath an umbrella. Her eyes had been dull and distant inside her pinched face, and fixed on the artful spray of white roses that adorned her sister's glossy black casket. Now and then she'd raised a soggy, crumpled tissue to swipe at her raw nose, and when the minister had intoned about green pastures and still waters, she'd shuddered and heaved and emitted a dolorous caw, a blackbird felled by a child's capricious arrow.

_And Boy Scout All-American William Cooper, GI Joe, and oorah yes, ma'am lied straight to her face, did you? She came up to you after they put me in the ground, snot in her nose and dirt from my grave still working its way beneath her nails to itch and burn beneath her skin. Her eyes were wide and watery and puffy with grief, and even though she was three years younger than me, she clung to the arm of the anonymous umbrella holder as if she were thirty-four going on ninety._

Mr. Cooper, _she croaked in a voice that did nothing to dispel the unsettling notion of age._ I understand you were there when Cindy was killed. _And oh, wasn't it strange to hear me called that, spoken of with a name that evoked, not the ball-crushing bitch that ordered deaths the way most people put in their lunch order with the office runner, but a little girl in barettes and pigtails that played with dolls and loved horses and brushed off her knees with fastidious care when she fell off the swing._

Yes, ma'am, I was. _Hands behind your back and spine ramrod-straight, just like a good Marine. Good posture always helped the lies go down a little easier._

_She peered up at you, eyes bright with tears, and that close, you could see the cruel scald of their predecessors on her cheeks. Her lips were cracked and dry beneath their veneer of lipstick, and her breath smelled like coffee and menthol and stale toothpaste._ Did he suffer? The man who murdered my sister? _The question was full of bile and bitter steel, and for just a moment, you saw the family resemblance._

_You thought of Denning's voice, nasal and droning as he orchestrated his latest rewrite of history with smug self-assurance, of me, cool and pleased beside him, so sure that everything was under control. Of the abrupt, cartilaginous pop of Denning's trachea collapsing beneath Moses' jabbing fingers._

_Of the copulatory buck of the gun in your hand, and the flicker of surprise in my eyes when I realized how badly I had miscalculated in the seconds before I hit the concrete and left my final mark on the world in a dark, red pool._

_You cleared your throat._ Not as much as he should have, ma'am, _you said. It was a brilliant piece of equivocation that would've made the brass proud. Just enough truth to make it burn on your tongue, but nowhere near enough to expose your tidy little story and upend your cozy suburban life._

_And my sister, who's never told a lie darker than her summer whites, believed you. She searched your face with tired, wet eyes, and then she nodded._ I hope they're burning in hell. _The smile she gave you then was all pale gum and too-sharp teeth, and then she tottered away, fingers clawed in the damp woolen fabric of that anonymous arm, and you found yourself wondering, stupidly, what she'd done with the soggy tissue. In your own way, Cooper, you can be as cold as your brother. You betrayed my sister without a second's hesitation, and she went on none the wiser that she'd bared her grief to the bastard who'd put three in my chest. Remind me to congratulate you when you join me in hell._

_Fuck you, Cynthia,_ he thinks wearily, and the gun bucks in his hand.

_I shouldn't be surprised,_ she muses, and amusement gleams, dark and sour as bloodied earth, in her eyes. What else should I expect from a guy who can betray his twin brother?

I never betrayed Kirill! he rages, and the steering wheel squeaks in his throttling grip.

_Not then, anyway,_ Cynthia replies, and laughs, bourbon and mesquite and a slow fuck in a darkened corner, and he sees Kirill standing in the driveway with his fists clenched and his heart shattered and the desire for blood and dirty vengeance trapped behind clenched teeth.

"The car might go if you actually start it," Kirill grumbles from the passenger seat. The casing of his cellphone creaks afresh, and his eyes dart to the screen.

"Yeah, well, I'm sure staring at them like some obsessive stalker isn't going to keep them alive, but you're doing it anyway." It's crueler than he intends, sharpened by his tete-a-tete with his late and unlamented boss, and Kirill's face closes as swiftly as a slamming door.

"Da," he says stonily, and twists away from him, wedges himself against the passenger door and stares out the window, mouth set in a grim line.

_So much for winning the Good Big Brother Sweepstakes,_ he thinks morosely, and God, this would go so much better if he could just fucking sleep. He pries his hand from the steering wheel and starts the car, and as he starts down the driveway, he gives reluctant thanks to the McNallys' insistence on a semicircular drive. Tasteful, they had called it in their sniffy fashion, and back then, William had been indifferent to the pronouncement, entranced as he'd been by the giddy, girlish joy on Mike's face as she'd surveyed her future castle, but now he's sure that if had had to execute a three-point turn, they'd wind up in the culvert, three wheels spinning uselessly and horn sending out its painful, wailing SOS to the whole goddamn neighborhood.

"I'm sorry," he grunts once he's successfully managed to exit the subdivision without accordioning the car against a hapless pine. "I'm just fucking tired."

A muffled snort is all he gets from Kirill, and he allows himself the fantasy of opening the passenger door and shoving the ungrateful motherfucker out to jounce along the asphalt at fifty-five miles an hour, but therein lies the way to even less sleep and a stint in the county jail, and so he quashes the impulse and forces his bleary, burning eyes to focus on the road in front of him.

"I did not ask for this," Kirill finally says when they're stopped at a red light a few blocks from the house. He's still huddled against the door, head against the window and the phone in his hand, bright with its unseen images of everything he holds dearest.

_And I didn't ask for your histrionic bullshit,_ he wants to snap, but he doesn't.

_And you won't, either,_ Cynthia pipes up. _Because who would be an ungrateful shit then? Yeah, you had to get rid of some asshole doctor's cockwagon in the middle of the night and maybe miss out on a little tit-grabbing session, but if it weren't for your pain-in-the-ass brother, you still be sucking dirt in that squalid little hotbox and wondering when they were finally going to put a bullet in your head and leave you to rot in the dense heart of nowhere._

"Didn't ask for what?" he manages, and wishes the light would change.

Kirill shrugs. "This."

"Real fucking helpful," he mutters.

"As helpful as you were on the fucking driveway," Kirill retorts flatly, and the phone twitches in his hand.

And there it is, the accusation against which he can offer no defense. He closes his eyes against the dull throb in his head and sees the impossible torque of Nera's torso as she'd reached for Kirill, her fingers stretched to the cusp of hyperextension and her mouth open in a wail of anguished entreaty that had gone unanswered.

That William had begged him to betray.

The logy heaviness in his limbs settles to cold lead in his veins, and he's turning the SUV before his conscious mind is aware of it, nosing it toward a side street and a favored greasy spoon he had frequented in his life of Before, when his knowledge of off-the-books interrogation sites had come from the comfortable distance of grainy video and heavily-redacted debriefing reports read over coffee and stale crullers in his brightly-lit office. 

"Where the fuck are you going?" Kirill barks. He's suddenly straight as a pin in his seat, and it's a wonder his phone hasn't cracked in his hand.

"Keep your dick in your pants. I need some fucking coffee if you want to make it to the store with your brains inside your skull."

Kirill subsides into a mutinous glower. Another check of his phone, and William is tempted to snatch it from his hand and hurl it from the window, but the ragged voice of prudence whispers that if he tries that little stunt, Kirill's likely to Frank Moses his ass and drive to the grocery store with him cooling in the cargo area. So, hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, and absolutely no pretending that the gas pedal is his brother's windpipe.

The diner cuts a lonely figure in the sullen darkness before dawn. The parking lot's blacktop is bathed in the lurid pink and blue glow of the stuttering neon sign that towers over the fat, silver lozenge of the building like a dispirited standard. There are a handful of cars parked in front of the cheap plate-glass window, slouched on their balding and under-inflated tired like winded steeds, their windows stippled with condensation. Their owners are inside, he supposes, equally slumped over chipped Formica tables whose patina of grease resists all attempts at removal, stirring artificial sweetener into gritty coffee and shoveling down lukewarm omelets and soggy toast slick with the promise of a future heart attack.

"You will eat here?" Kirill eyes the facade with cold disdain.

"You say that like you've never eaten an MRE." William kills the ignition. "And I said coffee, not eat." He opens the door and steps out, and then he turns and peers into the interior, one arm on the roof and the other draped over the doorframe. "Nobody said you had to come inside, but I might be a while."

Just as he thinks Kirill's going to give him the finger and snap at him to shut the fucking door and hurry the fuck up, he sighs and opens his door. His phone stays firmly in his grasp, and he spares it a glance as he comes around the front.

"Goat entrails."

"What?" William slams his door and engages the locks and the alarm.

"I've eaten goat entrails. And they weren't fresh."

William's gorge rises at the thought, but Corps discipline won't let him dishonor it so easily, and so he swallows against the slick in his throat and claps Kirill on the shoulder. Kirill spares his hand a baleful glance but doesn't shrug him off, and maybe it's his wistful imagination, but he thinks Kirill actually steps closer as they reach the door.

William opens the door to the aroma of coffee and home fries and bacon grease, and his stomach rumbles.

"If you're going to puke, do it outside," Kirill grumbles, and steps in front of him. So much for charitable fraternity. He scuffs his feet on the worn linoleum and stalks to a booth with a clear view of the door. He sprawls against the garish orange of the banquette with languid insouciance, the white of his bandaged hand stark against the cracked vinyl. He eyes the rust-pitted napkin dispenser, and then he plucks a napkin from its slotted maw and begins to pick at its drooping edges.

_Been doing that since we were kids,_ William thinks. _Used to drive the old man bugshit. Babu, too, come to think of it, though she wouldn't knock the shit out of you for it. She just thought it was bad manners._

It's largely deserted in these long, strange, unblinking hours before the sun casts its blazing eye upon the earth. There's a man in a rumpled button-down hunched in the booth nearest the door. His large, blue-veined hands dwarf the coffee cup around which they're loosely wrapped, and his bloodshot eyes blink numbly at a plate smeared with egg and dusted with crumbs and bits of hashbrown. He belches softly as William passes, and William catches the faint whiff of unbrushed teeth and stale whiskey and dimly wonders if he's been here all night or is just passing through on his way to a home and a family that don't much want him anymore.

A woman with sleep in her eyes and too much road in front of her sits in the booth closest to the bathroom, a baby carrier between her and the dingy, grease-yellowed wall. There's a thin blanket draped over it, obscuring the baby within, but he recognizes in her face the wan, hollow-eyed desperation of new motherhood. No older than six weeks, he guesses, probably less. She tries to muster a smile when she feels his gaze upon her, but such feats are for greater, less-exhausted mortals than she, and her tremulous lips collapse like the span of a buckling bridge. She drops her gaze, embarrassed, and William silently wishes her well and pretends not to see.

William's still sliding into the booth when a waitress approaches, pad in hand. She looks fifty in the leering, lurid light, with deep grooves etched at the corners of her mouth and tired eyes, but like as not, she's just north of forty and trying to keep her life from flying apart at the seams with a job that pays less than it's worth and takes more of her life than she ever expected to give it. She pulls a pen from behind her ear and offers them a bleak, faltering smile.

"What can I get you boys?" Quiet and brittle and tinged with the memory of Marlboros furtively savored beside the dumpster out back, their smoke an astringent yet welcome counterpoint to the high stink of old grease and mildewed cardboard and old french fries returning to the earth from when they'd once sprung. 

He starts to demur, but Kirill cuts in, sullen and ominous as a stiletto not yet unsheathed. "Coffee, black. Three eggs over easy, hash browns, whole-wheat toast with butter. Three strips of bacon, crisp. And two sausage links."

The waitress dutifully records this writ from the high king of Go Fuck Yourself and turns her attention to him. "Anything for you, hon?" The endearment emerges as the last, despairing honk of an exhausted goose.

He starts to shake his head, but then he remembers his entire reason for this detour. "Coffee, a whole damn urn." He offers what he hopes is a smile to offset the bluntness of the request, but he's so tired that he can't feel his face. He can, however, feel the hot pounding in his temples, and he wishes he'd remembered to cadge a couple of aspirin from the bottle stashed in the glove compartment. His hands rise from the table to massage his temples, but they scrub his face instead.

"Fuck," he croaks into his palms once the waitress has plodded away, her footfalls clods of damp earth tossed onto an unmarked grave. "I thought you weren't going to eat."

Kirill only grunts at him, and he entertains the notion of braining him with the napkin dispenser. A fretful wail emanates from the occupant of the carrier in the back booth, and he ruefully quashes the impulse.

"You look like shit," Kirill says at last.

The urge to part his hair with the napkin dispenser returns. "You fucking think? I've been taking out your garbage all night. Excuse me if I'm a little tired." He jabs a finger at him when he sees his mouth opening in protest. "And don't you fucking dare tell me you didn't ask for my help. If I hadn't taken out your garbage, then you'd be having a refresher course downtown about not taking things that don't belong to you."

"You think I should've taken an Uber?" Snide and waspish, and the napkin he's flaying by slow degrees bunches in his hand.

"Yes, actually. You had your credit card and phone, didn't you?"

Kirill says nothing, but his scowl deepens, and the next tear of the napkin is faster and less meticulous than the last.

"'S what I thought," William says with perverse satisfaction.

"It would've taken too long." Truculent, and so much like Tati when she's been caught in her latest round of bullshit that he almost laughs despite his roaring headache.

"Bullshit. You just wanted to stick it to that prick doctor."

"He thought I was a junkie," Kirill counters indignantly. 

That earns him an appraising sidelong glance from the waitress as she delivers their coffee.

"I wasn't kidding about a whole damn pot," William says as she sets a steaming, white cup in front of him.

"Don't worry, sugar, I'll keep you topped up."

"As for what the doctor thought, who gives a damn?" William says when their designated damsel in support hose and non-slip sneakers has shuffled to her next table.

_Obviously, I do, you fucking idiot,_ Kirill's expression says, but what emerges from his mouth is a haughty, "It is not my fault he has the constitution of an old woman."

"He didn't have Spetznaz training, either," William points out.

Kirill sniffs. "Of course fucking not. A soft-bellied limp-dick like that wouldn't qualify as a fucking washerwoman."

_A soft-bellied limp-dick or two like that saved your life,_ he thinks dully, and blinks stupidly at the steam rising from his coffee cup.

_Kirill saved his own life by being such a tough son of a bitch,_ Pamela Landy corrects him mildly. _We both know that if he were some nine-to-five asshole with dry-cleaned shirts and a 401k, he'd've died on that underpass. Hell, even you wouldn't have survived half the injuries he sustained. Whatever else they did to him, they taught him how to suffer._

_And you and the rest of the brass would sell your shriveled souls to get them on the payroll and learn all their nasty little secrets, wouldn't you?_

_You bet your ass we would. And you bet your ass you'd help us do it, too. Once a soldier of Uncle Sam, always a soldier of Uncle Sam._

He thinks of all the inconvenient messes he's cleaned up in the name of national security, all the wives he'd widowed and all the unsuspecting children who've come home from school or a weekend at Grandma's to find their world upended by some terrible bogeyman who will haunt their dreams forever, but whose face they will never know. How many of the widows and orphans of his making has he passed on the street with his own family, his arm around Mike's waist and ice cream smeared on the lips of his grinning children. The thought makes him stomach burn, and his foot tenses with the memory of a chair kicked from beneath flailing legs with the idle industry of a dad kicking the old ball around on a sunny Saturday morning.

_Milk, two percent? No, I should be home on time tonight. Love you, too._

Across from him Kirill takes a sip of his coffee and grimaces. He peers disdainfully into its depths and reaches for the sugar.

"Since when do you put sugar in your coffee?"

"I don't. But I am certain this is not coffee. I think this is tar she scraped from the asphalt out back."

"And you're going to drink it anyway?"

"Yes. And so will you if you do not want to fall asleep at the wheel and join me in having a crease in your skull."

Kirill snatches three packets from the caddy and tears one open with a vicious twist.

_I'm not sure the coffee's going to help._ His eyeballs feel three sizes too big for their sockets, and he dimly wonders just when someone found the time to replace his cerebrospinal fluid with damp sand. He picks up his own coffee with a hand that promises no success of the task and takes a cautious sip. Hot and bitter as ash and full of a fine silt that makes his cheeks hollow in instinctive revulsion.

"As I thought," Kirill says with grim satisfaction, and William realizes that the sly asshole has been using him as a guinea pig.

"Prick," he mutters.

Kirill, unruffled, opens another packet and empties the contents into his cup.

"Listen, Kir," William ventures, "are you sure we can't just go back to the house and crash and maybe take everybody out to a buffet later? When's the last time you cooked anything? And the microwave doesn't count."

Kirill freezes so suddenly and completely that William forgets the insistent throb of his temples and the curdled-earth bitterness of coffee on his tongue.

_This is the Kirill they made of him, of the little waddling boy who once wanted to follow in his mama's footsteps. This is the Kirill his targets see just before the lights go out. If they ever saw him at all. Chances are, he was nothing but a cold shadow that touched them once and left that terrible final emptiness in his wake._

He swallows against the dryness in his throat, but Kirill, as always, is faster. And so very much sharper.

"If you do not want to help me, brother, then don't. Leave me here. Go back to your family in their nice house and their warm beds. I will find my way, and I will take care of mine." Soft, almost lyrical, but the words dance over his skin like the cold serrations of a blade, and his eyes are hard inside his face.

_He'd let me go,_ William thinks. _If I got up right now and dropped a twenty on the table and shuffled out into the night, he'd let me go without a fuss. A last kindness to his brother. But if I go, that's the end of us. He'll cut me as dead as desert wood. I might see him at Langley from time to time, staring at his terminal with sullen detachment, but the only words we'll exchange are the ones required for him to keep his visa. No more dinners with us, no more summer block parties with the neighborhood, with him scaring the shit out of the kids with hardly-embellished tales of his misspent youth. No Easter, no Christmas, no more Uncle Kirill for Tati and Drushka. He'll be nothing but a fever dream that came for a few surreal years and then disappeared just as quickly. Bye bye, brother, and nothing I can say will ever call him back because as far as he's concerned, I said everything that needed to be said right here at this grotty little table._

"Why is this so important to you?" Plaintive and wheedling and far below his battered dignity, but he's just so tired, and he would give his lifeblood to go home and crawl beneath the covers with Mike and sleep until the weight of exhaustion sloughs from his bones. "Christ on His throne, you've never wanted to cook in your life."

Kirill says nothing. He merely tears open a third packet of sugar and watches the grains dissolve in the black sludge in his cup like fairy dust in brimstone. Nor does he say anything when his repast arrives, the fat of the sausage still popping and the yolks of his eggs gelid and unblinking as lidless eyes from their bed of hashbrowns. He blinks at his greasy bounty, and the despoiled pink packet spins lazily in his fingers, though William doubts he is aware of it.

_Mom loved his eyelashes,_ he thinks with suddenly melancholy, and swallows a mouthful of coffee to wash away the bitterness of old grief unexpectedly stirred.

The empty sugar packet spins and spins in Kirill's long, pale fingers, and his Adam's apple bobs. William suspects that he's deciding how much to tell him, how much of himself to offer up to his judgmental, exasperated inspection.

_I'm not like Dad, Kir. I'm not going to tear you apart for the sin of humanity._

_No,_ Cynthia purrs. _You'll just stand there with your dick in your hand and let somebody else do it for you._

He thinks of Kirill, his hand cupping Siberius' cheek in the milky, predawn light of that small cabin bedroom. That same hand reaching for Nera as she looked to him for rescue from the suited, lumbering men who were taking her away from her Baba and the new family she had been promised. That same hand dropping away and refusing to bridge that awful gap because he, William, had asked him not to, had invoked his claims of blood and superior age and bid him be a traitor for a second time. That same hand, livid and suppurating in a seedy hotel room that stank of cheap vodka and deep, wordless sorrow. That same hand, bandaged and tucked against his chin as he turned his face to the wall and waited for the world to finish its ugly work and take the only thing he had left.

The pink packet stops its languid, hypnotic spin, and Kirill lets it flutter to the tabletop, already forgotten. His eyes dart to the screen of his phone. Whatever he sees, it's neither what he hopes nor what he fears, because he unrolls his silverware, examines it for particularly-egregious stains, and picks up his knife and fork. He positions them over his sausages and eggs, lowers them, and raises them again.

"They chose me," he says brusquely, and lashes out at a hapless egg, whose bright yellow yolk he pierces with the tine of his fork.

_Nice and easy, just below the fourth rib,_ William thinks with dreamy morbidity. He hangs on to the thought, sifts it through his fingers like fine-grained sand, the better to quash the temptation to speed this confession along for the sake of his rapidly-diminishing give-a-damn. If he probes too deeply too quickly, Kirill is liable to shut down and take two hours to eat his breakfast for the sheer pissy spite of it.

"They chose me," Kirill says again, mulishly, as though William has disputed the point.

William waits. Another glance at the phone, and Kirill gives the yolk another listless poke with his fork. He picks up his coffee, casts a gelid eye upon its contents, and takes a fortifying gulp, which is immediately followed by a grimace.

"I was going to leave them," he says quietly. "On this grungy little trading post and resort for the less discerning."

"A shithole," William supplies.

"Mmm. Yes. But it was a shithole that reminded them of home. Sun. Beaches. Plentiful shellfish. Places to swim and fish. They were happy. They could've made a life for themselves. We had this little bungalow. It was a deathtrap, but it had this beautiful lagoon out back that Siberius loved to swim in. It was where-" He stops abruptly and turns his head to the window, a muscle in his jaw twitching.

_Not for me,_ William thinks. _Not that part._

"They would've been fine," Kirill finishes gracelessly. He reaches for the salt and pepper shakers, and William's eyes water as he douses his eggs in enough of the latter to cause a minor explosion should anyone choose this moment to flick a Bic.

"Jesus Christ."

"Siberius was a warrior in his own right, and Nera was strong enough by then not to need two of us to protect her." It's a snarl, and his eyes blaze with defiance.

_That's not what you think in the middle of the night,_ he realizes, but to offer up that little epiphany would mean an end to this heart-to-heart, and so he says, "I was talking about that." He points at the desecrated eggs.

All that gets him is a grunt, but Kirill's shoulders descend from around his ears. 

"Man, you must've had it bad to let go of a package."

"It wasn't Siberius, not at first." He adds a dash of salt to his eggs and cuts into them with the side of his fork. "It was Nera. She was a child, and no child deserved what was waiting for her if I brought them in." He takes a bite of egg.

"Did you know what was waiting for them?"

Kirill shakes his head. "But I had an idea. I have known such men as the Lord Marshall. They are bad men always, but pride and vengeance make them monsters. Nera was the reason for Siberius' disobedience, and so she would bear the brunt of his wickedness, if only to punish Siberius."

"Wickedness. You sound like Babu."

"She was not wrong about many things."

"I'm sure she'd be surprised to hear it."

Kirill flips him a lazy bird and crunches into his bacon. The sound rouses William's own slumbering appetite, and he avails himself of a piece hanging over the edge of Kirill's plate.

"Asshole." Kirill pulls his plate closer, as though the extra half an inch will make a difference. "She did not deserve death. She trusted me. She thought I was a nice man."

_And how long had it been since anybody made you feel like that? Even Uncle Sam sees you as an asset. If you dried up tomorrow, you'd be out on your ass to join Frank Moses in the RED files and get to spend the rest of your days waiting for someone like me to finish you off and call it an unfortunate accident at home._

"Do you remember when we were kids in Berlin?" he asks suddenly, and William is so nonplussed by the shift in topic that he cocks his head and reaches for the coffee that his stomach would happily reject if it weren't for the strident demands of a nervous system in desperate need of caffeine. "Before it all went to shit?"

_And when would that be exactly?_ William wonders uncharitably. _Dad was a mean goddamn prick for as long as I can remember. That goddamned apartment was a powderkeg._

But that's not entirely true, not for Kirill, at least. There had been a time, however brief and lost in a haze of future recrimination, when their father had been a father in more than name, when he had answered the call of chubby, outstretched hands and the eager thump of bare feet toddling across linoleum by bending to sweep them into his arms and pressing a kiss that smelled of benzene and juniper to cheeks still soft with baby fat. When he had cradled them on his lap while he watched soccer on their grainy television whose antenna drooped dispiritedly in the dark. When he and a cousin he no longer remembers had dragged a Christmas tree through the front door and wrestled it upright and into position in their small living room, and he and Mom had spent the evening decorating it, their cheeks rosy with booze and merriment. When he had sat on the couch and watched them open their presents on Christmas morning and not screamed at them for being greedy, ungrateful savages and trampling the presents underfoot as a visceral lesson on what happened when you asked for too much.

_You didn't want Nera to end up like you,_ he realizes. _You didn't want to break her trust and leave her to spend whatever remained of her life--minutes, hours, or years--with the grim surety that love was some dirty trick used to lure you in and then break your spirit. You didn't want her to remember you as the monster who smiled and ruffled her hair just before you threw her to the wolves. And on the off chance Siberius was strong enough to slip the snare and carry her away, you didn't want to be the one who poisoned her sweet heart and left her bitter and biting and raging at the world until the day she left it._

_You didn't want to be our father._

It's too big, too vast, too crushing for his soul, and he'll be damned if he'll have that conversation in this waystation for the lost and forgotten, and so he takes a sip of cooling coffee and swishes the tepid grit in his mouth to wash such dangerous words away.

"Some," he ventures, and even that single syllable tastes bloody and treacherous on his tongue.

Kirill bobs his head as though that's the answer he'd expected. His gaze is piercing despite the smudges of exhaustion beneath his bloodshot eyes, and William fights the urge to squirm until it drops to his plate.

"So you were going to cut them loose," William prompts when Kirill shows no sign of resuming the narrative.

Another bob of the head. "Yes."

"So why didn't you?" 

"Siberius." After he rounds up a few more bites of egg and crunches more bacon, he deigns to expound. "I tried to cut them loose before I cut them loose. Stopped playing with Nera. Stopped talking to them. Stopped-" He lapses into another abrupt silence.

_There's another secret he can't tell, another piece of himself he'll never show,_ William thinks shrewdly. _If you never admit happiness, then they can't take it from you._

"You turned on the charm, in other words," William offers drily.

"Kiss my ass," comes the reply. "Then, "It was not successful."

"Clearly."

"When I told Siberius I was leaving them, I expected him to be pleased. Instead, he asked me what was so pressing that I was willing to kidnap a Necromonger and a frightened, starving child, only to abandon them with nothing on a strange planet."

"Well, that does paint things in a less gallant light," William admits.

"You," Kirill spits, the word sharpened to a point designed for the tenderest of flesh. "I told him it was you. That I was searching for my twin brother, and that I would burn a thousand worlds to ash to find you. I had lost you once, and I could not do it again."

Kirill's eyes are wild with the telling, burning with the fever of memory, and he's holding his fork so tightly that it jitters faintly in his hand.

_You were at the end of your string, weren't you? Low on funds and sure you were running out of time. You took those two for a quick score, probably figured it was an easy job, an AWOL soldier and a sickly kid. Who the fuck would miss them? But then you realized you couldn't do it. You couldn't watch me die even if it wasn't me, and you couldn't betray a little girl who thought you were a safe friend in a scary world._

_You knew you were fucked right there. You couldn't screw them, and you couldn't save me, so you were just going to put as much distance between you and them as you could until you either stumbled across a miracle, or, what was more likely, your unhappy client found you and moved you to the top of his shitlist._

"I did not expect him to give a shit. Why should he after all that I had done in our chase across the galaxy? I thought I would be lucky if I didn't get a punch in the face and a kick in the ass before he sent me on my way." He gives his hashbrowns an unenthusiastic poke with the egg-smeared tines of his fork. "It's what I would have done, if I were feeling charitable." A jerky, one-shouldered shrug, but then he leans so far forward that the loose fabric of his shirt nearly dips into a congealing puddle of yolk.

"He chose me, Viko." A _sotto voce_ murmur, and the fragile awe in it makes his nape prickle. "This man who I had hunted to the ends of the galaxy, driven from hole after hole in a relentless pursuit, forcing him to push his starving little sister past her endurance, and who I would have sold to his miserable death for a few credits, he chose me, and in choosing me, he risked what he loved most in the world. Because I needed him."

_Not his help,_ some dogged, ever-alert part of William's mind notes. _Him._

Kirill eyes him in expectation of a reply, but he's clearly too slow on the draw because Kirill huffs and shakes his head in disgust. "Perhaps you do not understand because you have always been chosen. By the Marines. By the current friendly faces for whom you work. By your beloved and not-at-all full-of-shit government. By Michelle, who clearly took leave of her senses when she said yes." His lips twitch, but there's no sorrow in it, only a strained, brittle grief that makes William's throat tighten.

_By our mother,_ he thinks suddenly, but to speak the words around which his brother is so gingerly creeping would be to snap this rare and delicate thread of confidence between them, and so he does not. He doesn't need to; they lie between them, the thin, ominous outline of poorly-buried bones.

"Shut up," he says instead. "Mike knows a good thing when she sees it."

Kirill rolls his eyes, but doesn't dignify his spasm of domesticated bravado with further response. He sits back in the booth, oblivious to the dab of egg now drying to a crusty scrim on his shirt. "They chose me. And again they chose me. And again. And again. And every time they chose me, they paid for it."

William furrows his brow. "How do you mean?" He reaches out to fondle a tine of his fork, still wrapped snugly in its napkin cocoon.

"Please, Viko, you are not idiot. At least not when it comes to the cold calculations about how hard you are about to fuck or be fucked," he amends hastily, lest William think too highly of himself. "You don't think they wanted to leave a place that reminded them of home to eat MREs and suck in recycled air for thousands of kilometers of nothingness."

William's stomach, no stranger to the finest freeze-dried vomit the U.S government could buy, rumbles and moans in sympathy. "You said it was a flophouse planet."

"And yet it had lagoons and palm trees and customs they understood. It had lobsters and clams and oysters in abundance, and they took joy in harvesting them and making dishes from home. They would have adjusted in time, made a life for themselves. But he chose to come with me, to let me take them back to the man who would torture and kill them and make a game of it. He had devoted his life since he was fifteen years old to one thing: to killing billions so that one might live, and now he was wagering that precious life to help me."

There's something wrong with that math, some flaw in the equation, but his befuddled brain is simply too spent to suss it out, preoccupied as it is with the need for a prolonged coma and with the monotonous throb in his temples, and so he files it away for future reference and lets it go.

"Looks like it came out all right," William says, and wishes the waitress would come back with a fresh batch of paving tar.

"He nearly died," Kirill spits. "He challenged the Lord Marshal for his throne and won, but not before the fucker sank his blade into his gut beneath his armor and twisted."

William frowns, racking his sluggish brain for a recollection of Siberius' body. He has, he would have the record show, not studied it as intimately as Kirill no doubt has, but he can't recall any scars of life-threatening magnitude on his abdomen. Just a line thin as a razor's edge from halfway down his right side to just above his hip and a small, puckered dot just to the right of his navel.

Kirill must remember it, though, must remember it plenty, because his hands are fisted so tightly that the skin of his knuckles is pale as the bone beneath it. "The only thing holding his guts in was his armor," he rasps. "The fucker still managed to hide his weakness, to claim his kill and walk away under his own power."

"Then how-" William begins, but Kirill has turned inward now, lost himself within a memory hot and bitter against his heart.

"He was dying, dying as he stood there, and the only thing he asked of me was to not let her see. All I could see was the blood."

_And your first taste of anything good and sweet in your life slipping away,_ William thinks.

"If it weren't for that machine--and if he weren't such a stubborn prick-" Only Kirill, William thinks with crazed fraternal amusement, could hurl a declaration of love like the darkest accusation of unforgivable heresy, "-he would've died because of me and left me to explain to a child that the last of her family was gone and she was stuck with me. As if I could care for a girl. The only thing I know about women is how to fuck them and how to kill them. Everything else is the idle talk of an old woman I scarcely listened to, and then she was dead in the kitchen floor, surrounded by the stink of overboiled cabbage."

"I'm sure that wasn't his intent," William offers mildly. Anything to retreat from the wall of anguish radiating from Kirill like the stink of the infection that had nearly killed him, the high, pork-fat reek of death in the summer heat.

Kirill curls his lip as though William has announced he does believe in fairies, he does. "Death does not give a shit for intent," he spits, cold as a coiled cobra. "It does not give a shit for love or mercy or the empty, useless wishes of children clinging to their mother's skirts. It knows only what it can take, exists only for its duty. Surely you know this. Surely your Corps taught you this. Even if it didn't, you should have known. You are Russian, for all that you would like to forget." Kirill peers at him as though he is no longer certain to whom he speaks, as though he has mistaken him for someone else, and William knows that in this, he has been found wanting.

Kirill shakes his head once, the quick, cleaving sweep of an executioner's blade, and surrenders to the slipstream of memory once more. "It does not matter what he intended; it only matters what might have been. What _should_ have been. But there was the machine, and Sibrochka was a stubborn prick, so-"

"Machine?"

Kirill scowls at the interruption. "Some fucking thing like the Bacta tank in _Star Wars_. Kirill flaps a dismissive hand. "It healed him, closed the wound. I don't know how. I don't really give a shit, either. All I know is, it gave him a chance. He kept breathing and kept breathing and kept breathing, and eventually, he was strong enough to get the fuck out, which is another choice he did not have to make." Kirill drains the rest of his sludge.

"He killed the Lord Marshal and didn't have to run for his fucking life?"

"In the Necromongers, you keep what you kill." He sets his empty mug down with a thump. "If you kill the king, then you become the king."

"The king is dead, long live the king," William murmurs wryly. His tongue tastes of scorched coffee and damp earth, and he scrapes his tongue across his teeth to cleanse them of the noisome grit.

"And this king was very rich, rich enough to make the Saudi princes look like pauper children. He could have lived in splendor for the rest of his days and led an army that would crush every military force in our world like so many ants beneath his heel."

"C'mon. A force that big would have to be tens of millions strong and have access to weapons undreamed of by even the biggest not-so-closet sociopath who popped a stiff one at the thought of kicking puppies off of mountaintops."

"Yes," Kirill agrees simply, and William goes hollow inside his skin, as though he's caught a distant whiff of amyl nitrate. Kirill can lie, and with an ease that would make any sane man's skin crawl--that _had_ sometimes made William's crawl as he'd paged through the briefing reports of Kirill's many and varied ops, but he's not lying now; William's sure of it, and he's equally sure that's a little tidbit he'll never drop in the debriefing they both know is coming.

"Shit," he says, ragged and exhausted, and swirls the dregs of his coffee in the bottom of his mug. "If the brass ever get wind-"

"They won't," Kirill says flatly, and William's skin prickles. No little brother now, just the cold, feral bogeyman of those reports, now banished to the Secret Documents Repository at Quantico.

_Let's just hope Frank Moses never feels another pressing need to go there._

"What he could tell of them no longer matters. His knowledge of them ended the day he chose to go with me in search of you. He left the comforts he had earned with his blood to get back into a fucking tin can and search for some asshole he'd never met."

_I'm not an asshole,_ William's wounded ego protests, but he's too tired to lodge that particular juvenile protest. 

This part of the story he knows. It had come to him in fits and starts at that sagging, splintered refuge in Alaska, murmured over cups of coffee and shots of vodka and whiskey pulled straight from the bottle and imparted from the side of Kirill's mouth as they sat in rockers on the buckling back porch and watched the kids whoop and hoot and flit through the high summer grass like butterflies. Siberius, piloting their ship through the stars, his blood dark and tacky on the ignition switch. Siberius, who had been clear-eyed enough to see the simple truth Kirill could not, and who had cleaved through his blind, panicked flailing with a single, fleeting stroke of the knife. Blood would fly the ship, and blood would be their light in the dark. Siberius, knicking Kirill's palm with his blade, cold and sharp and clean as quicksilver, and dripping his blood into a sample tray.

_Your face is his face. Your blood is his blood._ Spoken like an incantation from a grimoire whose pages were yellow and frangible and covered with the dust of untold centuries and that carried the faint, bitter whiff of copper and sorrow and misdeeds for which there could never be atonement.

Siberius, stalking across the desert, eyes dark and fathomless inside his helmet, armed with only his discipline and his halberd and muscles that never seemed to tire. Siberius, silent as death as he rose up behind unsuspecting men whose guns never fired and whose heads rolled over the arid hardpan, eyes open and surprised and gathering sand in the eyelashes and mouth slack with screams that never sounded. Siberius, a bewildering mirage outside his cell who refused to disappear no matter how tightly he closed his eyes, and who surveyed him through the rusted bars like a lion watching the last, desperate throes of a wounded gazelle. No pity, no gentleness granted to this filthy, grubbing copy of the man whose bed he shared, only a dispassionate curiosity.

_Is this what we have come for? Is this it?_ Siberius, his sleek, silver gauntlets clinking as he tightened his fingers around the haft of his axe. The heave and creak of his blood-smeared breastplate as he drew a breath and raised it against this latest foe. The flash of sparks and the despairing screech of metal against metal as the blade found its mark. The pitted, rusted bars were no match for finely-honed steel and the powerful, practiced arms that wielded it, and they had surrendered with an agonized, echoing cry and pitched inward, flakes of rust spraying across the filthy floor like flecks of flesh. Siberius, who had stepped into his cell and gazed down at him, heedless of the cockroaches that had skittered over the toes of his boots in a bid to escape the unfamiliar and unwelcome glint of his armor.

_I thought he was going to kill me,_ William remembers suddenly, and the memory is so complete that he no longer feels the cool heft of the coffee cup against his fingertips or smells the peaty stink of the dregs of coffee in the bottom and the greasy richness of half-eaten sausage and congealing hashbrowns. There is only that cell, cramped and sweltering and noxious with his own shit. There is only Siberius, who has breached the profane sanctity of his suffocating little world, one foot beyond the threshold and his halberd angled across his body in a two-handed grip, alert but unafraid. The demure clang of his armored boot against the despoiled bars.

_I thought I was dead._ The thought comes with such cold, pragmatic clarity that he shivers in the close humidity of the diner. _I thought my friends with the wires and pliers and the fondness for roasting my chestnuts over Mr. Edison's smokeless fire had sent him as a parting gift, too tired of playing with me to finish the job themselves. He was so big in that cramped little shithole, a god striding among mortals, and I was sure he was going to bring the flat of that axe down and reduce my face to so much quivering jelly or use that blade to sever my head. His shoulders bunched, and I was sure it was coming, that the life and times of William Cooper would come to an end with a flash of silver and I'd wake up in hell, but it never did. He just stared down at me, his breath a muffled rasp against the mouthguard of his helmet. And then he stepped back into the light of the corridor and there was Kirill, a flurry of limbs and imprecations and questions barked into my face._

Siberius, who offered up his food and his medical supplies in the first delirious days of his recovery, when he'd been too weak and wracked with pain to go further than the toilet. Siberius, whose cooking had sustained him and warmed him from the inside, a balm for the incessant throbbing in his limbs and the incessant, sizzling prickle of his nerve endings conditioned to regular bouts of electrocution, and who was never anything but politely solicitous of his welfare.

Siberius, who had come bearing his tormentor in a sack as though he were some demented Santa Claus, Sasha the Christmas tiger made flesh. The somnolent thud of the wriggling sack as he'd dropped it at his feet. The impassivity of his expression as he'd nudged his prize forward with the toe of his boot.

_I thought perhaps this might interest you._ As though he were discussing a piece of quartz he'd plucked from the earth during his travels and not a human being whose blubbering pleas bled through the burlap in which he writhed.

"He tended you with a mother's hands," Kirill is saying, sharp with scarcely-contained misery, and the cheap ceramic of the mug is cool against his fingertips again. The smell of shit lingers, however, mingles with the smell of greasy potatoes and scorched coffee. William grimaces and presses his back into the padding of the booth as deeply as he can in a bid to escape the noxious melange before he vomits on the table.

"He did!" Kirill snaps. "He became a washerwoman and cook while I played nursemaid."

"Well, nobody fucking asked you to. Either of you." So sharp in the desultory silence that the scrape of the spatula against the griddle falls silent. Kirill blinks at him.

Kirill's thin lip curls to reveal a glimpse of canine, and his shoulders tense, and William is sure--as sure as his name is William--that the dam must break, that all the fury and bitterness Kirill has swallowed and stifled in the name of keeping his place and preserving the family harmony is going to spew forth in a scalding torrent and irrevocably reshape them both.

But Kirill surprises him. "He did not have to stay." Petulant, and he crosses his arms and leans back in the booth. "They could have walked away, taken to the stars and found a home on some paradise with more shellfish and fish than they could eat in twenty lifetimes. They could've gone back to that bungalow and that lagoon where they liked to swim." Another twitch of his jaw, and his gaze seeks the sanctuary of the window. "They owed me nothing. They could have been free, but they chose me. Chose to follow me to Fuckall, Virginia, and live in some snooty suburb with curated flowers and manicured lawns and no ocean for three hundred miles." No twitch now, but a full spasm as he hisses through his teeth and presses his lips together.

But it's in the words Kirill dare not say that the penny drops for William, a single clarion note of comprehension that cuts through the befuddling fog of his fatigue like a stinging slap, and with it, his bridling frustration with his brother evaporates, replaced by a desire to hug him, to come around the table and drape his arms around him with easy, unthinking affection like they'd done once upon a time in a land far, far away for him and yet so close for Kirill. Like they'd done before their father and the Marine Corps had made men of them. But too much time has passed, too many lessons have been taught by men with hard eyes and no notion of tenderness, and Kirill would never allow it, not here, beneath the gawking, prurient gazes of strangers.

And so William does the only thing he can, the only thing the wounds this life has inflicted on them will permit. He fishes his wallet from his pants and tosses a twenty onto the table.

"Come on," he says, and ignores the wet sand in his calves and the bright twinge in his back as he rises. "Let's go. They might be ready to put the fish out by the time we get there."

Kirill is silent when he rises, but his face is no longer so hard, so sharp. "Twenty dollars for paving tar and bad hashbrowns," he grumbles, but he reaches for his wallet and retrieves an identical bill, which joins the first.

"What's that for? I've already covered it and then some."

"I want to see what playing White Knight is like," Kirill snipes. "It seems to give your life so much meaning."

William rolls his eyes and heads for the door before his foot succumbs to the impulse to kick him in the shins. Kirill follows in his wake, stride sure and smooth in contrast to his shuffling lumber.

_He's a goddamn machine,_ William marvels as he pushes through the door into the parking lot and narrows his eyes against the faint, acrid tang of old exhaust and warm asphalt, but when he turns to make sure Kirill is still following him three strides into the parking lot, he finds him staring through the front window of the diner, watching their former waitress as she stretches across the counter to swipe at an unseen wet spot, and his eyes are not hard at all.

He turns as though sensing William's startled scrutiny. "Let's go," he growls, and stalks past him with grim purpose.

And William, blinking, can only follow.


	4. To Touch the Sun

He is not, he realizes as he stands over the stove and eyes the simmering pot with dismal trepidation, suited for the art of cooking. It had seemed so simple when he'd watched his grandmother at her work, bustling to and fro in her minuscule kitchen and muttering mysterious incantations under her breath as she'd chopped and diced and manipulated her vegetables with a dexterity that had belied her rough, arthritis-swollen fingers. Magic, he'd been sure, and he'd watched in wide-eyed fascination as she'd hummed and stirred and added a pinch of this or that and coaxed aromas from her ancient pots and pans that had made his mouth water and his stomach rumble greedily.

_Babu does magic,_ he'd crowed once, three years old and patting his pudgy hands on the rounded edge of her old table, a heavy rectangle of Russian oak whose glossy, varnished wood was black with age, and which his grandfather had often claimed had been made in the time of Catherine the Great. How it had come to be in the humble abode of rough-hewn peasants had never been explained, but it hadn't needed to be; he had believed with the simple faith of a child, and he had loved his grandfather with a blind ferocity that had made his heart feel swollen and ablaze inside his bony chest.

His chirping pronouncement had made his grandmother laugh, a rarity even then, when his father had been young and very much alive and not yet twisted into the hard, cruel taskmaster he would become, pickled by vodka and whittled to the hard, ugly pith by the inexorable demands of service to the motherland. She had dropped a sprig of something into her pot and rapped her wooden spoon on the side of her pot, the clangorous tolling of a bell.

She had turned from the pot with the spoon still in hand and stumped to the table on legs that still recalled their youth as a farmer's wife in Smolensk, when she'd milked the goats and the cows and bent to pull beets and potatoes from the rich, black earth. She had reached out and tapped the tip of his nose with one blunt, callused finger that smelled of salt and onion and damp, rain-kissed earth, and then she had leaned across the table on her elbows.

_You are right, Kiryusha. It_ is _magic_ , she'd whispered conspiratorially, and nodded. Her tone had been grave, but her eyes had sparkled inside her face. _It is a woman's magic, and it pleases God and man alike. Marry a woman who can cook, and you will never regret it._

_Like Mama?_

Her eyes had dimmed for the briefest instant, but her voice had been light when she'd said, _Like mama._ Another nod. _Fill your belly, fill your heart._ The table had creaked and popped as she'd straightened and brushed her leathery palm over the cornsilk of his hair. _Happy belly, happy heart,_ she'd said, and wagged an admonitory finger at him before she returned to her pot. _Let me cook, boy, or you will have neither._

She'd called it a woman's magic, and he suspects, as with so many things in life, she was right. It had seemed so simple when he'd watched her back then, three years old and too small for his feet to touch the floor, or even later, sixteen and cynical, with a head too empty and balls too full to pay her much mind. A dash of this and a sprig of that. A few stirs with a wooden spoon as familiar to her hand as the skin that covered it and a dash of lemon juice just before the end. But as he peers into his simmering pot, he feels no magic, no bubble of elation in his veins at a job well done. There is only the fatigue, smothering as wet bearskin, and a quiet, despairing heaviness in the center of his chest. He's already tossed out a batch for crimes against the kitchen, and he's not sure about this one, either. There's no oil slick on the surface of the broth from far too much olive oil, and the potatoes don't have the teeth-shattering consistency of hewn rock, but sense memory tells him that it isn't quite right; the smell is off--not rotten, thank fuck, but not the rich melange he remembers from his youth. Too much bay? Too little? Had she used a dash of white wine instead of lemon? Had she used garlic? Maybe he should have used pike instead of bass. Or used more leek.

"Fuck," he says into the dismal silence of the kitchen, and runs his palm over the bristles of his close-cropped hair. Then, "Shit." Spit like phlegm onto the hardwood. What the hell had he been thinking? There had been precious little magic in him even as a child. There was even less now that he was a man. His hands had been roughened by the grips of guns and the handles of knives, not the handle of a wooden spoon, and the only recipes he knows are the ones for explosives.

Somehow he doubts that will cure what ails them.

He absently runs his fingers through the crease in his skull and resists the urge to slap the pot off the stove and watch the contents splash and splatter on the fancy cabinets in a lively spray of carrots and dill and parsley. His welcome here is dangerously brittle if Mike's attitude this morning was any indication, and a useless tantrum that ruined her cabinetry might tip her past the breaking point and leave him out on his ass with a few suitcases and nothing to offer Nera and Siberius but a miserable, grotty apartment with small, gloomy rooms and linoleum floors and a fascinating view of the whitewashed, concrete facade of a garage that sold retreaded tires and refurbished auto parts, and whose grease-fingered employees could be seen surreptitiously pouring used motor oil into the grated storm drain. So the pot retains its place on the stove and he settles for opening a cupboard for the simple, petty pleasure of slamming it shut again.

_You would be the demon boy again,_ his grandmother sniffs with pious hauteur, and her rosary beads cluck in remonstrance as she pedals her rocker back and forth with puffy, purple feet. 

_Leave me be, old woman,_ he thinks, but what he wouldn't give to have her here. She was stern and set in her ways and had often smelled of cabbage and dust and the liniment she had rubbed into her knees and knuckles, but she was still Babu, and she was still capable of softness. She had loved him as best she could once his father had turned up on her doorstep and dumped him like a stray pup, had loved him as best she could, ever knowing that it would never be enough, that no matter how much soup she fed him or how many psalms and platitudes she poured into his ears and drummed into his head like a catechism, he would always wish he were somewhere else, that _she_ were someone else, someone whose shadow still fell on him while he pretended to play in her matchbox garden. She would have known what to do, how to cook the soup that had come to her from her mother and her mother before her and whose recipe was doubtless in her marrow. She would've known how to reassure Nera, with her too-thin arms and wide, watchful eyes and heart too full of unwanted knowledge. She would have worked her wondrous Babu magic and undone the malice of evil men.

Christ, what had he been thinking? What madness had seized him and made him think he could do this? Not just the soup, which had been fool's dream enough, but _this_ Nera and Siberius and the fantasy of an apple-pie life like William's, with a love and family and a manicured lawn and a place for everything and everything in its place? 

Fool, fool, he had been such a fool. Not even in the deepest depths of a drunken binge had he been so foolish. A questionable whore, yes, or thirteen drinks beyond his limit or a night on hotel sheets that had made his dick itch just looking at them, but not such a desperate dream as this. Such hopes were for men who had never held a gun, much less pulled the trigger and watched a man's brains fan across the elegant facade of a bakery like a peacock's plumage. Men who had never snapped the neck of a woman and wrinkled his nose against the jungly stink of her shit simply because she had sucked the wrong dick in the coat closet and begun to entertain impossible dreams of blackmailing her way out of the Latvian slums and into a Moscow penthouse with the unspeakable luxury of a crapper that actually flushed and didn't send a reeking sludge of shit over the side of the bowl and onto the faded linoleum. Men like Viko, who had sweated the sin of Russia from their bones and spent their lives defending the weak and the wounded and earning medals for bravery and for saving orphans and widows from men like him.

Not for men like him, who had sold his soul to the highest bidder and drowned any feeble prick of conscience with vodka and the warmth of a willing cunt.

He threads his fingers behind his head and releases a sour, shuddering breath. "What the fuck am I doing? I can't do this."

His grandmother's feet pump and pump, and the cross at the end of her rosary sways like a hypnotist's medallion. The gentleness of her answer when it comes surprises him; she'd never been a cruel woman, never been her son, who had used his mouth as a bludgeon and a surgeon's scalpel to divest him of himself and purge the last of his mother's taint from his bones, but she had been stern, had had little time for moping and self-pity. She has not spoken to him with such tenderness since he was ten years old and shivering beneath a tatty old blanket in the bedroom that had once been his father's, feverish with shock and grief and sobbing so hard that he'd been light-headed and retching, blunt-nailed fingers clinging to the nappy fabric as it could keep his head above the dark and bottomless waters in which he had so suddenly found himself.

_You can,_ moy mal'chik, she says, the tempered steel of her resolute pragmatism commingled with a grandmother's love for her stubborn, wayward grandson, Mowgli in cargo shorts and a grubby t-shirt that smells of paving tar and bacon grease and a sleepless night without end. _You can, and you will because no child of my blood will quit because he is afraid. You will take a deep breath, and you will straighten your spine, and you will go check on your family. Perhaps you will wake the girl. She has a fine nose. She will be able to tell if your fish has gone off if that is what worries you._

Well, it wasn't, but it is now. He doesn't want to rob Nera of well-deserved and much-needed sleep, but the alternative is to stand here like an asshole and second-guess himself into a migraine. "Shit." The desultory, impatient tick of sleet against a window. He gives the pot a stir just to busy his hands and satisfy his need to be more than a lump of dumb fuck, and then he picks up the chilled bowl of bass chunks and gives it a sniff. Nothing but a faint hint of the sea, clean and bracing in his nostrils. He nods as though he knows what that means and sets the bowl against the backsplash and--he hopes--beyond the reach of Boomer's gluttonous jaws. He's heretofore shown no interest in fish(though he has, Kirill has noted more than once with revulsion, a taste for any stray turd to enter his awareness) but there's a first time for everything, and even if he doesn't eat it, he might happily knock it off the counter and drag it all over the house, and wouldn't William and Michelle love that?

Once he's sure he's prevented the outbreak of World War Orlov, he sets the stove to its lowest simmer and shuffles toward the hallway. He moves as swiftly and lightly as he can, lest he wake up Michelle and William yet again and thereby spend the rest of his days as a forlorn eunuch, gazing wistfully at his cock and balls in an artsy display on the living room wall. If Michelle were feeling festive, she might paint one ball red and the other blue and paint his severed dick like a candy cane. Wouldn't _that_ be a treat for the kids, and the McNallys would have one hell of a story for their next stodgy mixer.

He moves through the hallway on the balls of his feet to minimize the solid thump of sole on wood that he normally finds so perversely satisfying, though he's not sure how much it matters; the furtive rustlings from inside Tat's room mean that she'll soon burst through the door in a whirlwind of rumpled cotton and mussed hair and sleep-puffy eyes to demand a blueberry Poptart and some chocolate milk at three hundred decibels before she thunders to the bathroom with all the stealth and grace of a stoned pygmy elephant.

_That ought to go over well on two hours' sleep in the past thirty-six,_ he thinks morosely, and wills her to stay in bed long enough for him to get some hot food and a sense of safety into the hostages to his pathetic fortune. The last thing they need is to eat breakfast with her loud and scandalized commentary on unfried fish ringing in their ears.

No movement from the master suite, thank fuck, and he's pretty sure he can hear William's snores through the door, short and brisk. A man of the Corps even in sleep. He wonders if Michelle has tried to smother him yet. The thought almost makes him smile.

The fleeting amusement fades as he descends into the basement. The milky light of early morning seeps into the room through the small, unlovely square of window opposite the still-overturned couch, which sprawls where he left it like a stiffening body. It's wan and feeble and cold, and in his mind's eye, he sees the green-tiled walls of a St. Petersburg morgue and the glint of a cold steel slab. Fingers gone green and black at the tips and eyes sunken in blackened sockets. A livid bruise across a puffy throat, thin as piano wire. A coroner in drab green scrubs and wire-rimmed spectacles who asks his grandmother if this was her son as if he were asking her which magazine she would prefer while she waited for her upcoming colonoscopy. Strong, broad fingers digging into his shoulder hard enough to leave bruises in their wake.

The silence is thick and complete, a living thing of sinew and pith and leathery carapace that crouches in the corner on thin legs with too many joints and watches him grope for the tatters of his equilibrium. It watches and it grins at his useless grasping, and its teeth are long and silver as Ariadne's needles and so very sharp. 

This, too, reminds him of a room, soundless and oppressive and shrouded in gloom, a tomb of cathedral ceilings and silver drapings and a hearth that gave no heat. A vast, canopied four-poster bed whose silk sheets were clammy against his skin when he crawled beneath them, the heavy, chill fingers of a dead whore. A form in the middle of that bed, white as alabaster and still as the grave it had cheated. And cold. Cold as a mouthful of the Volga in February, when it tasted of ice and blood and numbed the inside of your mouth for hours. 

A room where time grew elastic and cast aside the bittersweet mercy of the end. Where he he had watched the chest that now held two hearts and willed it to rise and fall and rise and fall and in the doing widen the distance between he of whom it was a part and the death he had so miraculously escaped. 

Too quiet. It's too quiet in here. There isn't even the burbling hiss of a regenerator tank or Nera's subdued burrs as she crouches on her toes and watches an orange roll across the floor in a game of her own devising. Just a yawning, anticipatory void that makes his skin prickle and sours his mouth with adrenaline.

_They're dead,_ he thinks dully as he plods past the toppled couch and wishes, absurdly, for the comfort of his gun, as though the heft of its grip in his hand, the unshakeable reality of it, will fend off the horror of what must surely wait for him in the small bedroom. _They're dead. Those stupid fucks at the Quantico Spa for the Cordially Uninvited gave them something never meant for their systems, or gave them too much, and when I get in there, they're going to be cold and blue and stiff as an Orthodox priest at a titty bar._

He knows it's not true, knows that when he last checked the feed on his phone ten minutes ago, Nera, at least, was very much alive, squirming lazily amid her nest of blankets in a bid to burrow deeper. Siberius hadn't moved, hadn't so much as twitched since last night, but he figures if there were trouble, Nera would have raised the alarm, would have tossed aside her blankets and keened her terror and confusion loudly enough to rouse not just the house, but everyone on the fucking block. So he knows that death does not wait for him in that most private of sanctuaries. Yet he cannot shake the numb certainty that it does, that the avenging god of widows and small children has had the last laugh after all and taken what he has dared to love as recompense for his numberless sins. After all, hadn't he gone to school one fine spring morning, sixteen and brimming with tentative hope for the future, and trudged home that afternoon with the ruin of all his nascent, fragile hopes still ringing in his ears? Hadn't he come home to the smell of cabbage still lingering in the air and his grandmother's prayer shawl lying on the floor in front of the stove?

He braces himself as he reaches the threshold, and his nostrils seek the odor of early decomp, ammonia and shit and the high, sweet stink of corrupted spring, but they find only the smell of warm bodies and warmer cotton and the baking soda and lilac-infused talcum powder of the detergent Michelle grabbed on her last grocery run. The magnitude of his relief is so great that his knees go to ball bearings inside his skin, and he braces his forearm against the doorframe to keep himself upright. A deep breath through his nose and a slow count to ten in both Russian and English, and he releases it through his mouth like a prayer.

When he's sure he's not going to faceplant and leave his dignity on the floor along with a vivid red smear from his flattened nose, he shuffles to the bedside and gazes down at Siberius. He's lying on his side, one arm outstretched across the expanse of white linen and knee crooked as though to bury itself in an unseen hamstring. His side rises and falls in a gentle swell. He's beautiful, though Kirill would never utter the word aloud and thereby expose his hopeless, helpless weakness, his pathetic, dangerous need, and his fingers throb with the need to touch, to caress. It's an indulgence he refuses. Instead, he rocks onto the balls of his feet and clasps his fisted hands behind his back.

_Why do you deny yourself such things?_ his grandmother asks, and shakes her head. _It only brings your sorrow._

_As if hope has brought me any less,_ he snarls, and bitterness wells in his throat like bile. _I hoped to be like Mama, and she disappeared. I hoped for a life with William, and he disappeared, too, became a ghost in my head that I could never banish because he looked back at me from every shitty mirror in every dismal little flophouse. I hoped to make you proud with a quiet, respectable life as an architect, and look how that turned out. You died while I was at school and left me nothing but an old flat that reeked of cabbage and age and overboiled piety. Hope is the foolish dream of idiot children and is best left behind. For all your faith, your God still let you die alone in front of your stove, growing cold on the floor in front of a supper you never finished._

It's blasphemous to talk to Babu this way, to mock a faith that moved and sustained her for all the long and unyielding years of her life and bade her smooth her hands over the leather of her Bible until it was smooth and soft as calf skin, but there's a perverse pleasure, too, a dark catharsis that loosens a knot of tension in his belly.

_Demon boy,_ she mutters in toothless reproach, but nothing more, ad her rocker continues its ceaseless glide.

_Besides,_ he says, torn between shame and mule-necked defiance, _even if it didn't, I shouldn't do this. What good is my love to them? Look at what it has brought them. What have they done since I came into their lives? What has it brought them? A life of sacrifice and subterfuge and an afterthought suite in a stranger's basement on a planet I doubt they would have chosen for themselves. Look at them._ His gaze sweeps over Siberius, and the bruises and welts rise from his customarily-flawless skin in scathing accusation.

His grandmother purses her lips. _Mmm. You could leave, yes. You could pack a bag and be gone before anyone was the wiser and leave them to the care of Viko and his Michelle. Viko is a good boy, and he would not turn them into the street to live as beggars. And this life has made you hard. You could live without them. You could._ She nods as though she has settled a weighty matter, indeed.

_But_ moy mal'chik- Tender now, the voice of smoothed foreheads and soothed scrapes and homespun quilts tucked beneath his small chin as the winter wind howled beyond the windows. _-you do not wish to. You can tell the world all the swaggering, boastful lies you like, as men have always done, but you cannot escape the truth. You love Siberius as you have loved no one else. The very thought of him makes your heart soar and your blood race, and though you grumble and mutter that cuddling is for women and soft-handed men with tallow in their spines and too much rich food in their bellies, you savor every touch, every kiss in the soft darkness of the night, when his lips are velvet and warm with sleep against your shoulder or the shell of your ear. You dream of such things as you once dreamed of a willing woman. As you once dreamed of one more evening in your mother's studio, sprawled on the floor with your sketchbook while the smell of turpentine and oil paints tickled your nose. As you once dreamed of one more night at the family table, sitting across from William as you mother dished out her potato soup and your father poured himself another vodka and the hum of the football match drifted from the living-room television._

_You could go back to the life that was. The women here are easily seduced by your eyes and your cheekbones and your smirking mouth, with its accent and its promise of filth whispered in their ears while you partake of what they so cheaply offer. Sinful women, and stupid, and you could have your pick. You would not even have to part with your money. But you would never invite them to stay when your business was finished. You would never dream of them, never delight in your name on their lips or breathed into your skin. You would despise them for what they could never be, for the wet-clay stink of their makeup on your sheets and the unwanted softness of their bodies. You would always wish they were someone else, and you would despise yourself for using them anyway._

_And you would always wonder and wish. Wonder what became of them after you walked away and wish you could go back. Wonder if they grieved to awake and find you gone, or if they were glad to be rid of you and your prickling, sniping, ever-grasping need. Wonder if Nera hated you for leaving her behind, disappearing from her life as unceremoniously as you had entered it, wonder if she blamed herself and assumed the shame of your cowardice, wore it beneath her clothes like a hair shirt, forever to remind her of her fault. You would wonder who Siberius was fucking now, as though it were still any of your concern after you had thrown such a gift away to spare yourself, and you would long to reclaim it for your own, to return to that place and time and quiet the insatiable hunger that gnawed at your bones._

_You would always wonder what might have been if only you had been stronger._

A rustling from Nera's mound of blankets catches his attention, and her head emerges in a tangle of long, brown hair. She brushes several strands out of her eyes and from the bridge of her nose and peers blearily at him. He can see her sleep-fogged brain slowly coming online, and after a few seconds of affable incomprehension, she offers him a fleeting smile and wave.

_She's up, at least, and all there, I think._

A wide yawn, and she turns beneath the blankets and rises to her knees, the blankets puddled around her waist. A swipe of her eyes and an idle scratch of her belly, and she sits back and holds open the blankets in invitation. A sleepy hoot. _You need a blanket?_

_Blankets are nice,_ he thinks suddenly, and his throat tightens. He clears it and shuffles to the foot of the bed, where he sits with an indelicate plop and pats his lap.

Nera gives a gleeful chirr and wastes no time in clambering onto his lap with her blankets in tow. She settles in, a princess upon her gilded throne, and tugs her blankets up and around her shoulders. She smiles up at him, and then she rests her head against his chest.

So small. So small she is. Small even for the child she appears to be. She's all birdbone and alabaster against his chest, and cold despite the multilayered cocoon in which sh has wrapped herself. He frowns and pulls the blankets more tightly still, and then he enfolds her in a snug embrace.

"So cold you are," he mutters to himself as he tugs and smooths and tucks her against his body. "You need more fat. So many twigs in a skin suit." The words come in a disgruntled tumble of dour imprecation, but his touch is gentle as he clucks and fusses. Nera, unheeding of the words she cannot hear, burrows closer.

"Regular meals and warm clothes," he thunders to himself. "I'll have you stout as a dairy farmer from Chelyabinsk by winter," he promises. He's lapsed into Russian, the language of hearth and home and babushkas with stern faces and healing hands. 

He buries his nose in the crown of her hair. It's soft and sleek after its oiling, and he wonders if Siberius' will feel the same. "No one will hurt you now," he vows. "You will be safe here, and you will grow strong and beautiful, and you will have all that you were denied. No hunger, no cold, no fear of men like me. No more wolves at the door."

Nera, oblivious to his fervid avowals, merely burrs and snuffles and begins to purr, and he knows he has surrendered his last chance to escape the snare he set for himself the moment he tasted the lagoon water on Siberius' lips and chose to drink more deeply of it. He could almost laugh at the sublime absurdity of how neatly this trap of his own making had closed around him.

_You could no more leave them now than you could put a bullet in her head the day you saw her squatting in that scrubgrass like a cornered rabbit kit. They became yours the day you chose to let them go even if it meant going to your death never knowing what became of William. To abandon them now would take more than you possess in either courage or cowardice. The last of your honor and worth as a man would fall away, and you would become your father, a hollow man drinking to fill the emptiness and hoping for a bullet to end your wretched life._

He pulls back, and she looks up, irritated by the loss of contact and its concomitant warmth. _I know, such a tyrant,_ he signs, amused. _You want to help me with your brother?_

Pique turns to curiosity, and she cocks her head in mute inquiry.

_I made us some soup with fish in it, but I need you to tell me if the fish is yummy before I put it into the broth._

She blinks up at him, mulling over his proposition. Finally, she raises her hands in reply. _If the fish isn't in it yet, then how is it fish soup?_ she asks, and her eyes are bright and avid inside her face, a magpie eyeing a particularly shiny treasure.

The simple logic stymies him, and he gawps stupidly at her while his brain struggles for a response that doesn't make him sound like even more of a dumbass. _If she were properly educated, she'd be dangerous,_ he thinks as she waits for his reply.

_She might be yet,_ his grandmother says. _She is young yet, and willing, and you and Siberius have all the time in the world to see that she gets all that her new world has to offer. She might be small, but so were you once, and her fire burns hot._

_Well, it will be once I add the fish,_ he amends. _Besides, I used fish to season the broth._ Christ, he's faced down men with knives and guns and fistfuls of Semtex in their hands, and yet he feels the need to defend himself to a sickly child whose most formidable weapon is the gas she launches from her ass at frequent intervals.

_What has my life become?_ he wonders dismally.

The answer comes at once, soft and sure and wrapped in his grandmother's authoritative cluck. _Sweet. Impossibly, unbearably sweet._

Nera hums and clucks and taps her steepled hands against her chin, considering his explanation with the hard-eyed solemnity of a military tribunal. Her deliberation must've reached a positive conclusion because she gives a decided hoot and nods.

"Thank you, Your Highness," he mutters peevishly, but his grousing goes unnoticed as she beams at him.

She points to the bathroom. _Mind if I piss first, hoss?_ she seems to say.

He grunts his approval and flaps a hand at her, and she slides off his lap with her customary boneless agility that never fails to unnerve him. Once on her feet, she gathers her blankets around her like a greatcloak and pads to her date with the porcelain throne with the ostentatious serenity of a promenading queen, soles of her bare feet tamping the floor with a homey smack.

_Don't drop the blankets in the toilet,_ he's tempted to call after her, but it would be wasted breath, and so he settles for a sigh and a fervent prayer that he won't have to run the washer at seven in the goddamn morning, and when the last of her cotton and polyester train disappears into the bathroom, he turns his attention to her brother. 

It's a matter of moments and a flick of the sheets to crawl in beside him. Siberius doesn't stir, doesn't so much as snuffle into his pillow, and Kirill's heart is heavy as it thumps against ribs that ache with the sudden memory of old fractures left to mend themselves in the frigid air of the barracks. He slips his arms around Siberius and presses himself against his back. He's breathing, thank fuck for small favors, but he's too still and cold for his liking.

He presses his lips against Siberius' neck and squeezes him. "Wake up," he murmurs into his ear. "I'll be damned if I'll let you run to fat by lying on your ass."

_With an enticing invitation like that, how can a man resist?_ Viko says drily, and Kirill flips him the mental finger. Siberius must agree with his assessment, though, because he doesn't so much as twitch.

He swallows the childish impulse to plead. Such things come to nothing, as well he knows. Even his grandmother, with all of her magic and all of her love for him, had been unable to undo what was, been unable to bring his mother and Viko back again and quiet his hysterical tears and the agonizing cramps in his belly that had persisted for years after his father had packed him into that station wagon and torn him in half. And if she couldn't do it, with all of her power and all of her love, then what chance does he have now that she is so much dust and bone beneath distant earth?

And yet, the sting of injustice persists, prickles and burns beneath his skin as though poison sumac has found its way into his veins. He has seen too much to believe in the ultimate triumph of justice; too many times, he has been the man who has perverted its course with the effortless squeeze of a trigger or the practiced twist of a knife. And yet he yearns for it now with the manic, inconsolable desperation of a child who seeks this small recompense from a world that has robbed him of everything else.

_It's not fair,_ his heart cries. _Notfairnotfairnotfair._ Siberius is the one who hugs, who comforts and soothes and coils himself around his body in a sheltering cocoon. It's Siberius who croons and reassures, and whose cool, supple fingers patiently unthread the hot knots of tension in his neck and spine and banish the crushing ache in his skull. It's Siberius who wrests him from the strangling grip of the nightmares that threaten to send him headlong into the abyss. Siberius is home and comfort and as reliable as the earth beneath his feet. Siberius does not fail. So how can he be like this, so silent and so still, and so very fragile?

It wasn't supposed to be this way. They were supposed to come home from their idyll in the Alaskan wilderness and settle into life behind Viko's picket fence, sleeping in clean beds and eating hot meals not cobbled together from MREs and skillful hunting and foraging and planning where to go from there. They were supposed to come home and let William indulge his inner caveman by grilling steak and salmon and those stalks of asparagus that Kirill secretly adores, with their char and their hint of smoke and cayenne butter. Instead, they'd barely made it into the driveway before even that cautious little dream had shattered at his feet in a flurry of wool suits and outstretched hands, and now he's lying here in this rumpled bed and trying to keep the bedrock of that dream from crumbling to sand and slipping through his fingers.

"Wake up." The ominous hiss of steam rising from a volcano. He nips the nautilus of Siberius' ear. "Wake up, asshole. I'll be damned if I'll let all my work go to waste because you won't get up."

_Such things you say to him,_ his grandmother chides, and shakes her head. _Why should he wake from his dreams? I suppose they are happier than your sniping._

_It's not what I want to say,_ he counters. _It is not what I mean._

_Then why do you not say what you mean?_ Ever the soul of practicality.

_Because._

Because he can't. To speak his heart is to wish, and to wish is to invite denial. To speak his desires is to be robbed of them cruelly and swiftly and irrevocably. Maybe if he hadn't been so glad of his life with his mother and Viko, so stupidly trusting in its endurance, they wouldn't have vanished like so much dust in the wind and become nothing but fading voices and indistinct images that haunted his dreams. Maybe if he hadn't dared to tell his grandmother of his foolish dream to become an architect and build the world, she would not have died in front of a stinking pot of cabbage and left him with nothing but a prayer shawl, a rosary, an old Bible, and a list of what-might-have-beens. So he will keep his mouth shut and everyone safe. What is never spoken can never be stolen.

_Foolish boy,_ his grandmother says, but without her usual tutting scorn. Her voice is soft, and tremulous as crystal but carelessly handled, and her dark eyes burn with anguish. Moy mal'chik... _It never should have been this way for you, my fierce little Kiryusha._

Her naked sorrow stuns him, as though he has glimpsed the soft, pallid nakedness of her flesh, and he turns from it, jaw clenched and body hot with shame. He slips his hand into the waistband of Siberius' boxers, and the smooth, bare skin beneath his fingertips soothes him. He releases a long breath and stirs his fingers in an idle caress.

A muffled voice from the pillow. "I do not have the strength for what your hand proposes, _ma atet nin_."

He's instantly alert, and he jerks his fingers out of Siberius' boxers and raises himself on his elbow. "So you've decided to wake up, have you?" he snarls. Relief has made him vicious, and his tongue strikes like a lash. "How kind of you to join me here in the real fucking world. I'm tired of listening to Nera plant a whole goddamn garden in the bathroom." He draws away with a scandalized huff even as he longs for greater contact.

That draws an amused huff from Siberius, and he rolls to face him. "How is it that the bitterest vinegar tastes the sweetest of wine upon your lips?" he murmurs with sleepy fondness.

Kirill's only response is a dour harrumph, but then Siberius is pulling him into a kiss, and there is no anger, only need. He opens to the kiss, partakes of it with the urgency of a dying man come to the waters of an oasis, and his hand cups the bank of Siberius' head, fingers curling into strands that are, in fact, as smooth as Nera's.

_Don't leave me,_ he thinks wildly as the kiss deepens and he exults in the possessive, silken fire of Siberius' tongue. _I know I am too hard, too sharp, too much my father, but I love you. Don't make me live without you._

Siberius' hands on the side of his neck, warm and soft and oh, so good, and he whines with the pleasure of it. He's no stranger to isolation, to months of celibacy in the name of the job at hand and the pursuit of a payoff, but Siberius has become an addiction, a need that simmers in his veins and prickles beneath his skin, one as deep and unshakeable as the jones that drives that little whore in the parking lot of that seedy motel to suck fifty-year-old cock atop sheets stiff with other men's jizz. His body has ached for the want of him, and some small part of him is ashamed to want so much when he has long prided himself on needing nothing but himself and his training and the cool heft of a gun in his palm, but he is helpless against it.

" _Moye zhelaniye_ ," he murmurs against his mouth.

Laughter rumbles from deep within Siberius' chest, dark and promissory as the river depths. "I am here, _ma b'tu nin._ Though as I have told you, I am not fit for what you have in mind."

"The only thing I had in mind was waking you up," Kirill retorts, but his flushed cheeks and urgent panting and tented cargo pants belie his affronted hauteur.

"And in that you have succeeded most admirably." He strokes his cheek and offers him another kiss. "My spirit is most willing, _ma atet nin_ , but my flesh is not fit for the task as I would perform it. Whatever they gave me has made me slow and stupid."

Kirill doesn't give a rip for perfection, for the well-oiled romps of porno movies and brothels. He only wants to touch, to bite and nip and claim, to reestablish a connection so ruthlessly severed by the agency his brother so happily serves. But he also knows that Siberius' refusal is a true measure of the battered exhaustion he can see in every line of his body and feel in the uncertain press of his hands on either side of his neck, and so he tamps down his surging libido and resigns himself to another night of blue balls.

Siberius' hands rise to cup his cheeks, and his fingers seek out the dent in his skull, cool as balm against his restless flesh. "You are loved beyond all measure of the world, and I would not dishonor you with less than my best. Just let me get a bit of food to flush this poison from my system and perhaps once Nera has gone to bed, I can live up to the honor you bestow upon me with such a title."

Kirill allows himself the briefest moment to savor the caress and the silver-tongued flattery with which it is so deliciously perfumed, a cat arching to a duly-worshipful hand upon its spine, and then he says, "I've made some soup for you. Maybe it will help you clear that shit from your system."

"You've cooked for me?" The delight in his voice and the adoration in his gaze makes Kirill's heart flutter, and he promptly decides to invest in a few more recipes. He won't go so far as to buy a cookbook and a frilly apron and fret over proper knife selection, but a quick trawl of the Internet might yield a few promising candidates. Potato and leek soup, maybe, or cabbage soup, or a simple goulash. Something to stick to the ribs and light the eyes. Anything to make Siberius look at him like that again.

_You have finally learned what we women have known from the beginning. A man's heart might sit in his chest, but the paths to it run through his prick and his belly,_ his grandmother says with serene dignity and a sly gleam in her eye.

He ignores her. The less he thinks of his grandmother and pricks, the better for his psyche. "Don't act so surprised," he sniffs. "I've cooked before. In the field as part of survival training."

"And I'm sure it was delectable. All those snakes and rats and beetles. Didn't you once tell me that one of the exercises was to deaden the gag reflex?"

"Yes. Didn't you?"

Siberius shrugs. "We ate what we captured. If we did not conquer, we did not eat."

"Well, you don't have to eat it if it isn't up to your lofty standards," he sneers.

"How you fuss. Of course I will eat it. That you have cooked for me is a gift."

Kirill shifts beneath the bedclothes, mollified. "We would be eating it right now if Nera weren't doggedly trying to single-handedly fertilize the entire Southeast." He cast a gelid eye at the open bathroom door.

"Be patient with her," Siberius murmurs. "She adores you, and she can't help the volatility of a stomach that no longer knows what to do with regular meals. Perhaps it will settle in time."

"For the sake of the air quality in this house and the linings of our lungs, I hope it is soon." He curls his lip against the miasma that drifts from the bathroom.

Siberius ignores his grousing. "Who can say what they fed her in that hole? I certainly don't remember."

"She could at least close the door."

"She spent twelve years shitting into a hole in the middle of the floor. I suspect she has forgotten the niceties. It's nothing that can't be remedied once we've settled in."

There's a final, bugling fanfare from the bathroom, followed by a glottal, gurgling flush, and then Nera emerges with a smile, still wrapped in her bedroom finery. 

"I'm going blind, and she's pleased with her handiwork," Kirill grumbles.

"Such a flair for the dramatic," Siberius replies, as though his eyes aren't stinging from the foul assault. 

Nera makes to clamber onto the bed and join the cuddle party, but Siberius raises a forestalling hand. She rocks back on her heels, stung by the seeming rejection, and her brow furrows. She cocks her head and utters a disconsolate hoot. _Nera bad?_ She tugs her comforter cloak more snugly about herself.

_Of course not,_ Siberius signs, quick and imprecise, and he tosses off the sheets. _But you didn't wash your hands, and you need to do that, especially since we're going to have food. Put down the bedclothes and go wash up. I'll be right behind you._

A crestfallen Nera heaves a woebegone sigh and releases her hold on her bedclothes wardrobe. The assorted blankets and duvets puddle at her feet, the comforter on top like a fallen meringue, and she steps over them and turns once more to the bathroom she had so recently vacated in all her cotton-and-down splendor.

"Such pathos. I see why you two get along so well," Siberius murmurs.

Kirill harrumphs and glowers. "Kiss my ass."

"Oh, I plan to," Siberius drawls, and the sly, promissory gleam in his eye makes Kirill shiver. He throws off the sheets and swings his legs out of bed. It's slow and graceless and accompanied by far too much grunting and the cracking of vertebrae, and worry, which had begun to subside, settles in his belly like an incipient cramp.

"Where are you going?" Shrill as an old fishwife, and he'd blush if he had any shame where Siberius is concerned.

"To piss," Siberius answers with amiable vulgarity. "And to ensure she hasn't forgotten how to wash her hands properly." He rises with more alarming creaks and pops of tendon and shifting vertebrae. He's too old for his years, slumped and shambling as he follows his sister into the bathroom, and Kirill doesn't realize he's clenching his fists until the ragged skin of his lacerated palm prickles and burns, warm ash rubbed into raw flesh. He wills his fingers to relax before they can reopen his wound and breathes slowly and deeply until the helpless fury recedes.

_They will pay for what they have done to him, for the grace they have stolen from him. They will pay for every mark upon his flesh, every grimace. They think that because I sold my country in exchange for my blood, I have been tamed-_ The thought, cold and clear, and sharp as the blade of his treasured K-bar blade, almost makes him smile. _-but this is not so. I traded Mother Russia for the chance to be with Viko again, yes, but I have paid that debt in full and then some, and Mother Russia was all too eager to cast me out without a tear._

_Much like the weak-willed bitch who bore you,_ his father jeers, his eyes bloodshot and his voice belligerent and thick with vodka.

_Mother Russia loved you no better,_ he reminds him with grim satisfaction. _She used you as long as it pleased her, and then she wiped her ass with you and dispatched you with a bullet to the base of your skull like a useless stray. Tell me, Papa, were you so stupid as to think yourself a favored son?_

He had traded his faithless Mother--she who had thought so little of him that she hadn't bothered to fight for the chance to kill him--but he has not traded himself, nor has he surrendered the lessons he has learned at her unbending knee, and they will serve him well, as they have always done. He will wait, and he will watch, and he will compile. It will take time--years, perhaps, certainly more time than his outraged lover's soul would like--but that is all right. Mother Russia might have stinted her soldier sons when it came to food or rest or medical care fit for more than animals, but she had bequeathed him a surfeit of discipline and implacable will. He can be patient, ill though the virtue might rest upon his shoulders. He will be what his American keepers think they have made him, meek and mild and submissive, a pretty little whore with her legs spread and with no thought of the promised money in her empty head, and when they think him toothless and tamed and broken, he will strike. Hard and clean, but most assuredly not quick. No, not quick. He will be as thorough in the execution of his mission as he was in its planning, and the cocksuckers who so thoughtlessly inflicted those bruises on his Siberius will pay for every one of them.

_I will have to make sure Viko stays clean. His life might be embarrassingly banal and American, but it's his, and he loves it, and I have already cost him more than enough._

_It is four o'clock in the fucking morning, and I am tired. I am tired of the fucking chaos in this goddamn house, and just once, just for one goddamn night since you came into this house, I would like a night of peace and quiet._ Michelle, steel and brimstone and seething fury, a mongoose baring her fangs against the serpent that has slithered into the midst of her happy, ordered life.

He will have to leave once the op is done, will have to draw any retribution away from Viko's cozy little sanctuary, a sanctuary already defiled by Frank Moses. It's an invasion William has never forgotten, and Kirill cannot bring himself to commit such a betrayal. He will leave, cash out some of the treasure plundered from the bottomless Necromonger hoard and disappear with Siberius and Nera. No cellphone, no forwarding address, not a trace. They will disappear into the untamed wilderness of Irkutsk, with its rolling hills and lush forest of pine and spruce and larch and the sweet lure of Lake Baikal and its bounty of fish for the catching. Or perhaps Okinawa, with its beaches and its coral reefs and abundance of fish and shellfish and waters as blue as the heavens. Or New Zealand, with its sun and sea and soaring mountain peaks. An isolated paradise in which to start anew, far from the reach of petty vengeance.

He's comfortable and torpid in the warmth of the bed, and he's tempted to let the tension bleed from his body until sleep takes him, but the soup that he has so painstakingly constructed from boyhood memory and for which he has risked the wrath of William and his disgruntled lady fair is waiting, and he's afraid that to leave it much longer would be to court defeat on the eve of victory. And so he crushes the indulgent impulse with a ruthless fist, promises himself a clandestine cigarette behind the garage once the kids and Michelle can no longer catch him unawares and sully the experience with their dour-mouthed disapproval, and leaves behind the seductive warmth of the bed with the merest pang of regret. He stifles a yawn and scratches his balls and ambles to the bathroom door.

Siberius stands in front of the toilet in the time-honored stance of men, feet apart and back straight and hand holding his cock, which is busily draining the contents of his bladder in a full-throated rush. Nera, meanwhile, is swaying in front of the sink, gummy-eyed and fumbling with the bar soap in its dish, a dish, Kirill now realizes with the grim mortification of a bachelor who has left his porn magazines in full view of a visiting cleric, in desperate need of a wash.

_Thank fuck someone cleaned up the blood,_ he thinks as he steps into the small, humid room and flips on the exhaust fan in an attempt to dispel the stench of long-brewed shit recently and enthusiastically expelled. The fan whirrs into obedient life, and he wishes it godspeed as he crosses to the sink in two strides and snatches the hair-flecked cake of soap from her hand.

"I'll get you a fresh one," he mutters when she blinks up at him in surprise. Her confusion and burgeoning terror at the possibility of committing some dreadful wrong don't abate until he opens the blinded medicine cabinet and slaps a new bar into her palm.

_That one is shit,_ he signs.

She nods at him as if to say, _Yes, I did take a shit, thank you for noticing,_ and Kirill huffs and wishes Siberius were available for more precise translation, but he's still merrily doing his damnedest to replenish the Potomac. 

He leaves Nera to her ablutions and turns to face Siberius, who's still pissing with the determined vigor of a Russian sailor on shore leave. "Jesus Christ, did you go to happy hour at a Sevastapol bar?" he demands.

Siberius gazes at him in amiable incomprehension, hand still wrapped around a prick that continues to spray like a fire hose. "I am not familiar with Sevastapol. Is it renowned for its fine spirits?"

Kirill snorts. "You could say that." He's fairly certain that most Russian sailors would happily chug rubbing alcohol by the liter if necessity demanded, especially if it were cheap and garnished with a hint of juniper and firm tit, but now is not the time to discuss the finer points of Russian liquor culture. "You look like you've emptied the whole fucking bar."

Siberius sways on his feet and blinks as if to clear his vision. "I am sorry, _ma atet nin_ ," he says, soft and strained, the phlegmatic rasp of ice cracking underfoot, and Kirill's soul aches with recognition. It's the voice of a soldier pushed past all resistance, spent and broken and moving only because he knows that to stop is to surrender, that if he stops, he will sink to the ground and vanish into himself, never to stir again unless yanked to his feet by a comrade and dragged to the med tent, where he will stay until they either ship him back to Moscow for evaluation and a quiet discharge or simply snap his neck and call it a training accident.

Kirill gentles at once. "You have nothing to be sorry for," he says softly. "Sometimes I think you would apologize for breathing. Do I frighten you so much, my love?"

Siberius sways again, and the fingers around his prick slacken. "No," he says slowly, and he narrows his eyes in concentration, as though thought is an effort. "No. I do not fear you. But I know that I am not...as you wish me to be." He closes his eyes, and thee vein in his temple throbs and pulses.

Kirill steps behind him and wraps an arm around his chest, palm pressed to his chest and lips pressed to his nape. Siberius' heart thunders beneath his palm, too fast for the simple act of standing in front of the toilet and taking a piss, even one so long as this.

"That is not your fault. Lesser men would have weakened long ago, and they had no right to take you in the night like some dog meant for culling." His tongue longs to lapse into Russian, the language of home and safety and a time before bloodletting for his supper, but Siberius would not understand, and so he forces it to remain in the unlovely traces of English. 

"You owe me nothing, _moye sokrovishche._ Any debt you owed was paid when you chose to follow me instead of fleeing with your freedom as any sane man would have done. You are a god among men, and I will never forget the sight of you stalking through that fucking compound with your halberd like Death. I think Viko nearly shit himself."

Siberius mumbles what sounds suspiciously like, "How romantic," but his heart has slowed beneath his hand, and the neverending stream of piss has fallen silent.

Kirill nips the sensitive flesh of Siberius' nape and soothes it with an open-mouthed skim of his lips. "You will not apologize," he murmurs into skin that is finally beginning to warm. "You will eat soup and drink tea, and then you will sleep as long as you wish. As long as you need."

"I think the Cooper offspring will be up soon," Siberius says.

Kirill shrugs against his back. "So be it. "They have enough electronic shit to entertain themselves until their parents wake up." _And if they don't, I'm not above bribes._

"Someone should watch them."

"That is not your concern, mmm? Your only concern is to eat and get well. The fruit of my brother's loins might be loud and tireless and prone to concocting schemes that will likely get them put onto several watchlists one day, but they are not complete idiots, and thanks to their good Russian genes, they are remarkably hardy. Any misadventure in which they might find themselves will likely not be fatal or cause an extortionate increase in their homeowners' insurance premiums."

"How reassuring." Dry as sun-bleached bone, and so like Siberius in the bloom of vigor that he allows himself to hope. Then, befuddled, "The fruit of your brother's loins?"

"Never mind," he says gruffly.

A soft thump against his ass and the small of his back heralds the arrival of Nera to the impromptu cuddle party. Small arms slip around his waist from behind, and her breath warms his spine through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. Her hands are, he notes, still damp from their recent wash. He doesn't have the heart or the energy to push her away, and so he tells himself that the soup is(probably)fine and buries his nose in Siberius' nape.

"If you are finished with your piss to rival Thor, you should return your cock to your boxers and wash up yourself," he mumbles after a few deep breaths.

"Perhaps I should shower," Siberius muses, and his neck shifts under Kirill's mouth as he turns to survey the shower.

Kirill raises his head. "No," he says firmly. "No shower. The soup is waiting, and I don't want to leave the fish out any longer. The smell of your ass will not ruin the ambiance."

"My ass smells?" Alarmed, and Siberius twists in his embrace.

A sigh. "If it did, do you think I would be standing so close? Stop obsessing and let me feed you."

Siberius flushes the toilet. "As you wish, _ma atet nin_." He reaches for a swatch of toilet paper and sets about the persnickety business of cleaning himself, and Kirill thanks whomever had the foresight to tonsure his bishop. Better a shake and a wiggle than the prolonged fussiness of dabbing at his dick every time he took a piss.

_Be glad he bothers,_ his grandmother pipes up. _Many men don't, the filthy swine._

And that is all he wishes to know on that particular subject, please and thank you, so he tables the burgeoning discourse by releasing his hold on Siberius and turning to chivvy Nera out of the cramped confines of the overcrowded bathroom.

Siberius is no less thorough in cleaning his hands than he was in cleaning his dick, but he does eventually emerge, and after that, it's easy enough to herd him and Nera before him and up the stairs into the house proper. What a pathetic little band they must make, Kirill muses as they shuffle down the hallway in a bedraggled, morning-after conga line, red-eyed and slouching and tousled, refugee siblings from a world reduced to a smoldering cinder and the useless fuckup brazen enough to think he has anything to offer them. 

Quietly as falling shadows do they move. Kirill fights the impulse to reach out and draw his fingers over the unbending line of Siberius' spine, held with perfect martial discipline despite the minute sway in his customarily-flawless stride. He catches a glimpse of Nera's shift as it bells around her bony legs. She has none of her brother's training and martial dignity, but she moves with the furtive agility of a mouse, ever attuned to the encroaching shadow. A flash of small fist, and Kirill knows that her skinny knees are poised to drop into a defensive crouch at the first hint of danger.

_Watching for the bogeyman,_ Kirill thinks, and his promise of future retribution against the assholes who soured what should have been a joyful homecoming is tart as arsenic in the back of his throat.

Nera steps to the left and drops to her haunches when she reaches the end of the hallway, weight on her toes in preparation for sudden flight and her eyes on her brother as she awaits his command.

Siberius skims his fingers over the fleshless spar of her shoulder. _OK. No danger. Proceed._

Nera rises from her crouch as quickly as she'd dropped into it, a wraith of quicksilver and smoke, and darts toward the kitchen.

Kirill steps around Siberius and hurries after her to make sure she doesn't douse herself in hot soup in her zeal to help. But she stops just inside the kitchen, chewing her lip and smoothing her rumpled shift.

"Always so prudent, you are. Good." He smooths her hair as he passes and returns to the stove to inspect his hard work. It's still as he left it, with no sign of reduction or a covering skin, and he allows himself a surreptitious sigh of relief. He picks up his spoon and gives the contents a stir to play for time and calm his nerves, and then he turns and beckons to Nera.

She obeys the summons without hesitation. Her gaze settles on the pot, and she hoots in melodic inquiry. _This it, boss?_

He shakes his head and picks up the bowl of chunked bass. He holds it out to her and raises his eyebrows in hopes she will grasp his meaning and damns her language for so often requiring both hands. Nera, thank fuck, is a smart child, and after a glance between the bowl and his face, she strides forward and bends her head to take a prolonged sniff. She looks up with a grin.

"I'll take that as approval." He pats her shoulder and points at the dining room. "Sit."

Siberius chooses then to appear, of course, and Kirill mutters under his breath and stalk to the stove. "Of course you show up now." He adds the fish to the soup, turns up the heat, and gives the soup a peremptory stir to register his disapproval.

Siberius only hums and yawns and joins his sister in the dining room. 

"I once struck terror into untold hearts, and you merely hum at me," he grouses.

"Would you have me fear you?"

_Not you, my love. Never you._

"I have no wish to be a toothless old dog."

He busies himself with bowls and the distribution of soup and the preparation of tea. Not the fine, rich loose-leaf of which Siberius is so fond--not even the overpriced, bourgeoisie market so loved by the Cooper family matriarch carries that, much to his seething irritation--but some outrageous swill in cheap bags that smell of wood pulp and pencil shavings and budgets stretched thin. If he'd had his way, he'd've held out for a trip to a tea emporium that smelled of damp earth and tea leaves and new-money pretension, but William had been all but comatose on his feet by then and murderous, to boot, and beggars couldn't be choosers. A brawl in front of Tati's beloved dino nuggets, much as he might've enjoyed besmirching the neighborhood's frosty and closely-guarded dignity, would have been a waste of time.

_See, Babu? I have learned restraint,_ he says loftily.

"Four people in this house, three of them of good Russian stock, and yet they have no samovar," he huffs, scandalized, as he ladles soup into a pair of bowls. "You would think they would know better. William, at least ought to. America has drained the culture right out of him. I should have gotten one today, but William's reserve of charity had run dry, and I did not wish to fight. Tomorrow, I will find proper tea and a decent samovar. And fish and fruit and cheese that does not taste like the plastic chairs at the school Tati attends."

He's dimly aware that he's rambling like some hectoring housewife, but he needs the distraction, the frenetic verbal insulation against possible failure. Better that his lips should tremble and falter than his hands. He steels himself and carries the bowls to the table, where he sets them in front of their recipients with a stolid thump.

He turns away almost at once, unwilling to witness the spectacular collapse of his fledgling culinary ambitions. "I will see to your tea." No longer a hectoring housewife, but a disgruntled waiter. He retreats to the safety of the counter and a pair of steaming mugs.

But the mugs cannot demand his attention forever, and they strike him as scant protection as he carries them to the table. He hovers diffidently over Siberius, watching warily through the earthy steam as he picks up his spoon and stirs the contents of his bowl with the narrow lip.

"Well?" Brusque, and he jabs a mug at him.

Siberius' lips twitch as he accepts the mug with an inclination of his head. "Perhaps I would be able to offer a better judgment if I were to taste it first," he says mildly, and sniffs the tea.

_Well, get the fuck on with it._ "I know the tea is shit, but at least now it is shit with honey."

Siberius snorts around the rim of his mug and takes a long, slow sip. His eyelashes flutter, and a sigh sounds from deep within his chest. "Gratitude."

An indignant squawk from the other side of the table reminds him of the mug in his other hand, and he sets it down in front of Nera, who grabs it with both hands and faceplants into it with noisy gusto.

"Trying to wash the taste out of your mouth?" he asks darkly.

"Or she is simply thirsty," comes Siberius' sedate reply.

"She'd have to be to drink that. It tastes like dirt." He pulls out the chair beside him and plops into it.

"And yet you gave it to us."

"How is the soup?" Nettled, and he crosses his arms.

"This is a family recipe?" Siberius takes another sip of tea before he sets down the mug and studies the soup. 

"Yes." _Just say you don't like it and be done with it._ Kirill's foot taps a staccato against the hardwood floor. "If you are expecting Wolfgang Puck, you will be disappointed."

"Who?" Siberius scoops some broth into his spoon, tilts the former from one side to the other, and slips it into his mouth, where he swirls it on his tongue.

_What is this? Are you playing sommelier now?_ Kirill thinks impatiently, and his foot increases its tempo.

Another bite, and then another.

"Well?" Restraint cast at last to the wind like so many of his ethics.

Siberius sets the handle of his spoon on the side of his bowl and sits back in his chair. "I think I could not ask for anything more."

Kirill hums and searches his face for the tells of deception, for the infinitesimal sneer in the corner of a mouth or the knowing gleam of mockery in an eye or the downturned moue of distaste discreetly smothered, but he finds no trace of artifice, of snide, gloating amusement at his needy gullibility. There is only Siberius, face slack with relief and tired eyes soft with fondness and an infinite patience that terrifies him even as he longs for it. He has never known anything so deep or so sweet, and if it should run out...

Another lingering spoonful of soup, and then Siberius puts down his spoon and takes Kirill's hand. "You are not toothless, _ma atet nin,_ " he says in his lovely, resonant voice, the deep, dark waters of a restless river. "Your teeth are yet sharp, but they are not meant for my skin. To cook for someone is to offer them a piece of yourself. I see who you are, my Russian princeling, and I do not find you wanting. I know I could not be safer, no matter how sharp your teeth." He gives his hand a squeeze and returns to his soup. "The only thing this soup lacks is your company in its enjoyment." 

It's too sweet, the promise now before him, too ripe for disappointment. The things he loves never last, never stay. His mother. His grandmother. Viko. Even Russia is lost to him now, the gates of Eden forever barred. This will be no different. Sooner or later, he will lose this, too. The patience he now sees in Siberius' eyes will fade, replaced by bitterness and hard-eyed indifference. Siberius will weary of his failings, and imperfections that had once seemed minor will grow in the viewing, become massive, glaring flaws that even he cannot ignore with a lover's besotted forbearance. Tempers will grow hot and short and nights will grow cold and long, and one day, Siberius will pack his belongings and his sister and leave him behind like dust kicked from his heels.

And yet...

And yet.

And yet Siberius is still here. He had not turned from him as he so often could have done, had not caved in his skull as he slept and fled with Nera to freedom. He had not washed his hands of him and retired to a life beside that lagoon he and Nera had so loved. He had not left him to find William on his own, with nothing but his life and a shitty shuttle with no hope of repair or rescue should it fail. He had not given up on William, had never once suggested that the search was futile, and once they had tracked him down, he had not hesitated to pick up his halberd and follow him down that shuttle ramp.

And yet...

And yet he has never weighed his every word and deed to find its insult, its unforgivable flaw. He has never begrudged his frequent failings, has never refused to forgiven when his tongue has been too sharp or his hands too rough in what should have been gentle. He has never looked at him with disgust, never shaken his head and declared him weak, less than hoped for, too small and too thin and too soft. He has never taken the love he offered and then declared it unworthy of the effort to acquire it.

And yet...

And yet, Kirill cannot help but want this, want this glorious sweetness. He wants to believe that he is enough, that he is truly Siberius' only desire. He wants to believe that he is the man Siberius sees when he looks at him, battered and prickly but not without honor, with decency buried beneath his gruff exterior. 

He wants to believe that he, too, can have a happily ever after.

"Are you sure?" His voice is oddly thick, and he clears his throat.

Siberius pauses in mid-bite and slowly withdraws the spoon from his mouth. "I have never been more certain," he answers simply, and goes for another bite, and it occurs to Kirill, as he gets up to get a bowl of his own, that his grandmother might have passed on a bit of her magic, after all.


End file.
